Data Comics for Climate Change
Selected Projects | | Links: Project Website
While there is a gap between what the general public and policymakers understand about science and what is known by experts, this gap is particularly perilous regarding climate change. Climate change is increasingly recognized as a paramount threat to life on the planet.
The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlights the extreme and worsening impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, heatwaves, drought, flooding, regional food, and water shortages, storm damage, and more.
Scientists are generating massive amounts of data about climate change and developing significant understandings of the causal factors, wide-ranging projected impacts, and necessary mitigation and adaptation strategies. To know how to respond and make changes both policymakers and the general public need to be better supported to develop actionable comprehension. Currently, scientists inform each other via expert publications and conferences. We, as part of the public and policymakers, receive our information via the media and the web – and in our current catastrophic blending of information with misinformation, we are at risk of well-intentionally taking ineffective or even harmful actions and decisions. We need the best and most current scientific information in an easily accessible format that includes data transparency and is also both scientifically informed and verified.
To close this gap, we (with Dr Sheelagh Carpendale, Dr Michelle Levy, and Dr Stephan Gruber) have assembled a team that includes experts in data visualization, narrative construction, data comics, and climate change. We will work collaboratively to develop climate change data comics that combine compelling narratives with comprehensible data visuals that are informed and verified by the appropriate scientists.
This project is supported by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).
Poster presented at Graphic Interface 2023:
This comic was presented at a top international conference on permafrost (ICOP2024) and featured in the 2024 State of the Mountains Report.
To cite this work:
From Science to Story: Communicating Permafrost Concepts with Data Comics Zezhong Wang, Stephan Gruber, Michelle Levy, Sheelagh Carpendale. The 12th International Conference on Permafrost (ICOP2024) 📄PDF
