The Repercussions of a Changing Climate, in 5 Devastating Charts

The Sixth Assessment Report released earlier this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is chock full of information on how our climate has changed because of human activity and warnings about the challenging future as our planet warms. 

Much of this information is conveyed through graphics, which consolidate thousands of pages of information into digestible nuggets of information. IPCC Senior Science Officer Melissa Gomis helped lead the design process of these visualizations, supporting designers to create graphics that are understandable to the average reader. She said graphics can have more of an impact than simple text and are highly shareable in our digital world.

“In the context of climate change, they really help visualize what is happening over different dimensions (may it be time or space),” she said, “what is not perceivable out of raw data or out of your window.”

She and a team of authors, designers and cognitive experts collaborated to narrow down report findings into single sentences that could be explained with graphics. 

Here are some graphics Gomis’s selected from the report that summarize its key findings.