Harnessing Visualization for Climate Action and Sustainable Future

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of responsible data visualization in climate action, proposing five key considerations to improve engagement, understanding, and collective efforts toward sustainability.

Contribution

It introduces five critical considerations for designing responsible visualizations to enhance community engagement and foster collective climate action.

Findings

Inclusive visualizations improve climate education

Interactive tools deepen user engagement

Shared immersive experiences catalyze collective action

Abstract

The urgency of climate change is now recognized globally. As humanity confronts the critical need to mitigate climate change and foster sustainability, data visualization emerges as a powerful tool with a unique capacity to communicate insights crucial for understanding environmental complexities. This paper explores the critical need for designing and investigating responsible data visualization that can act as a catalyst for engaging communities within global climate action and sustainability efforts. Grounded in prior work and reflecting on a decade of community engagement research, I propose five critical considerations: (1) inclusive and accessible visualizations for enhancing climate education and communication, (2) interactive visualizations for fostering agency and deepening engagement, (3) in-situ visualizations for reducing spatial indirection, (4) shared immersive experiences for catalyzing collective action, and (5) accurate, transparent, and credible visualizations for ensuring trust and integrity. These considerations offer strategies and new directions for visualization research, aiming to enhance community engagement, deepen involvement, and foster collective action on critical socio-technical including and beyond climate change.