NERC COVID-19 Digital Sprint Hackathon Success

Students from the WISE and SAMBa CDTs, under the awesome banner of ‘Team Coronasaurus’, entered the 2nd week-long NERC COVID 19 Digital Sprint Hackathon. Ari Cooper-Davis, Cristina Corti and Mikkel Lykkegaard (all Exeter), and James Rand and Piotr Morawiecki (SAMBa CDT) were tasked with using NERC and other publicly available databases to understand the impact of Covid-19 lockdown and how any lessons could be applied to mitigation actions needed to meet the Paris Accord to reduce climate change.

Looking at the way many organisations and companies rapidly adapted to alternative and home working practices through the proxy data of traffic, energy use, emissions along with disease, social and population data, ‘Team Coronasaurus’ proposed a blended work week solution. With a 2+2 working week proposal (longer working days with 2 in the office, 2 at home and an extra day off per week) a reduction of some 10-20% in the UK’s CO2 emissions is predicted.

Commended for their good analysis, modelling and informative YouTube video, ‘Team Coronasaurus’ was awarded 3rd place overall. You can watch the ‘Team Coronasaurus’ YouTube video at https://youtu.be/s0e5wG3_MOM and the interactive Jupyter Notebook/Binder on the GitHub repository can be found at https://bit.ly/2Bx0JWh.