Visualizing global environmental change

Can we do more and better?

Visualizing global change (image created in leonardo.ai)

(Updated 25.9.2023)

Global change is a complex phenomenon encapsulating the various ways in which humans affect the planet and its ecosystems. Communicating this kind of change and its effects, as well as the drivers underpinning this change, to a broad audience is quite important, but also a challenge given the many factors involved.

What are visual tools depicting global change as a whole? Let’s go through some of the ones that immediately come to mind.

The planetary boundaries concept is a useful metaphor to illustrate the various planet-level threats that affect Earth, and that result from a range of human activities (the most updated version is here). This kind of depiction is focused on the consequences (the effects) of global change. It does a good job illustrating that we are ‘above’ some of the boundaries, and that there are multiple aspects to consider (the various ‘rays’ in the figure), that is the various boundaries. These visualizations do not really depict the individual global change factors or their interactions, but focuses on planetary consequences.

Time series data, like the famous Keeling curve of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations, or curves depicting an increase in temperature, also are powerful illustrations of global change. In this case the aspect of the steady increase is emphasized, or the suddenness of the increase in a geological time frame, depending on the scale of the x-axis. This is an important visual tool to communicate that the human-linked effects unfold on an unprecedented temporal scale, and it shows the magnitude of the drivers.

The multitude of factors acting on ecosystems is an important aspect of global change, and one of our papers emphasizes the biological, chemical and physical nature of various factors of global change; in fact this was an exercise in trait-based classification of factors of global change. The resulting visual is a matrix of traits, and it serves to illustrate the diversity of factors. Again, this visualization doesn’t capture factor interactions, but classifies factors on their nature and based on traits (including also effects).

Another very good tool are global maps. Maps, global maps in particular, but also maps at the country or continental scale, are a great way of showing the extent of the various global change factors. Some maps are pictures, and others are more interactive, letting you zoom in. One example is the global map of light pollution. Mostly, maps depict one factor at a time.

Calculating the magnitude of the human influence and visually comparing it to aspects of the natural world is also a powerful way to depict global change. The emphasis here is on the scope of the problem. A great example is the great paper in Nature that calculated the mass of all human-produced object, comparing it to Earth’s biomass (Elhacham et al. 2020; Nature).

Scenarios are a great way to visualize the effects of various actors of global change. This is particularly well done for factors of climate change, where the scenarios make the consequences of continuing with ‘business as usual’ and comparing to various other choices. I think detailed scenario calculations and depictions like this are not readily available for many other factors of global change.

Did I miss any other, important visualization approaches for global change? Please let me know in the comments!

I feel we could use more visualization types, this is such a complex topic and we can use the help! In particular, I think we need visuals that emphasize the potential interactions among global change factors. This is a huge challenge, because there are many factors at play, and therefore an enormous amount of possible interactions as well. And it would be great to incorporate some of the information from the other visualization approaches mentioned above.

Any ideas?!