When climate data is transformed into visuals, some people and places get overlooked

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When a climate disaster happens, people thousands of miles away may encounter it through numbers: how many people died, how many were displaced, how many homes were destroyed and how much infrastructure was damaged. But for the people living through it, the disaster is not a data set.

It is a home, a family, a livelihood and a place. Billions of people around the world live in places and situations that are highly vulnerable to climate change, such as parts of Africa, Asia and small Pacific islands. Data visualizations have become an important way of communicating climate change.

Warming is represented through colors, emissions through lines and bars, and floods and fires through maps and animations. These visualizations can make an enormous and complicated problem easier to understand, but they can also shape how people feel about it. Crucially, some visualizations don't tell the full story.

I explored this in my new research with 34 social media users in the U.K. and Poland. I showed participants climate data visualizations and asked them how they felt and what they did with the information. Participants described worry, fear, sadness, anger and concern, but also curiosity, surprise and pleasure, suggesting that visualization can make unpalatable data more enjoyable.

The warming stripes visualization for Poland (above) shows temperature changes through colored stripes. One participant said this visualization looked "so pretty, nice and interesting." But once they understood what the colors represented (red for warm temperatures; blue for cooler temperatures), their reaction changed, and the image became upsetting. The visualization did more than show climate change: it changed how the participant experienced it.

One of the most revealing moments in my research came from a meteorologist from Tonga who used to live in the U.K. They first saw the warming stripes visualization shared on social media, but Tonga was not shown as a location. They commented on the visualization, asking whether stripes could be created for Tonga.