Paving the Way for Green Maps
With a deluge of maps available on the World Wide Web these days, it would not be surprising if websites monitoring the environment are becoming available for the general public’s perusal.
Such is the case for MapEcos, a new brainchild of the students and faculty from three leading US business schools.
A CNN article by Peter Walker explains how MapEcos offers information on the environmental performance of more that 20,000 industrial facilities across the US, with its interactive maps to reveal government data on toxic pollution, information on the facilities themselves, and what the companies are doing to protect the environment.
MapEcos purpose
Michael Toffel, an expert on industry self-regulation and an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School, said that MapEcos is a public service because it makes environmental data readily accessible to others.
This could help grab the attention of the public, and provide vital information especially to environmental activists. Users of MapEcos can track and compare factories’ pollution activities and monitor what is being done to address these. Clearly, this website is a goldmine for environmentalists looking for cold, hard facts provided by the industry managers themselves.
Michael Toffel, Andrew King, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, and Michael Lenox, an associate professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business were assisted by Dartmouth College students in producing the site.
In fact, King said that what led to the launching of the site was that they thought their projects had one major flaw: information wasn’t getting to the decision-makers. MapEcos website allows these environmental issues, concerns to reach not just the decision makers, but a broader audience as well.
MapEcos content
Users of MapEcos can view areas as traditional maps, as satellite imagery, or both, with industrial facilities color-coded according to their emissions levels.
Data such as name, location, industry, emissions level, volume and health hazard of each facility's toxic chemical emissions, operational policies, management systems, activities, staffing, and investment can be found in the site as well.
Of the entire US, red dots abound, with power plants and metal mines having the greatest amount of toxic pollution. The largest emitters? They can be found in in Utah, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Texas.
Other environment-related sites
- Solar Maps - features energy produced, carbon dioxide reduced and solar installations in San Francisco, CA. The city has set an ambitious goal of achieving 10,000 solar rooftops city-wide by 2010, reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by the year 2012. Their other cutting-edge environmental initiatives can be found at SFEnvironment.org.
- The History of Solar Power Installation in California - a new Google Maps mashup created by CoolerPlanet.com
- Google Solar Project (Google Maps link)
- Interactive Historical Map of Solar Eclipses (1961-2039)
- UN Atlas of Our Changing Environment
- World Map of "Natural" Homes
- SundanceChannel Eco-mmunity Map of people, businesses and POI's
- American towns damaged by toxic waste
These websites are already paving the way for readily accessible environmental data to the general public. The time to go green is here.
Sources:
Lagace, Martha. Mapping Polluters, Encouraging Protectors. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5824.html
Pegg, Mike. Solar maps. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/
San Francisco Solar Map. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from http://www.sf.solarmap.org/
Walker, Peter. Mapping out the environment. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from
http://www.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/12/11/execed.mapecos/
(Published 18 February 2008, Smart Schools Program)
