Carbon Brief: IPPC contributors, 30x30 nature pledge, & infrastructure.

21 Feb, 2025

Lots of charts this week. One of the things about working on a journalism schedule again, especially in a small team, is that you can't be too precious about things. Often I spend time pulling a graphic together only to realise there’s probably a better way to do it a couple of hours before publication, not enough time to try the new idea. The flip side is that it gives you a certain license to try stuff and move on, the body of work as a whole is more than any individual charts. This week I feel I could have got better results with a bit more time, but also that I got to try out some stuff, enlarged the tool kit etc. On balance positive.

IPPC author analysis

There's a new IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report coming, the Special Report on Climate Change and Cities. We've been tracking the demographics of IPPC report authors for a while ₁ so this was an opportunity to update that work. ₂

I made some charts illustrating the contributions over time, focusing on women (historically under-represented) and people working for institutions in the "Global South", (ditto)...

First off, a pretty simple choropleth. I quite like the idea of splitting it into two halves rather than having two different colour scales or something. Scrolling is the main way people interact with web pages and I feel like we shouldn't be afraid of using the height of the page to be really clear about things. Also, the portrait form generally works better on mobiles etc. This can lead to grotesque “tower graphics”₄ but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

a choropleth map showing author distribution

For the next couple the obvious choice would have been a bar chart but I think the lines do a better job of drawing the eye and they feel a bit lighter.

a trend line showing rising representation for authors from the global south it tops out at about 40%

a trend line showing rising representation for women IPCC authors, theres a steep rise right at the end breaking the symbolic 50% barrier

Also a slight variation on was made for our newsletter ₃

Finally we have some big hybrid bar charts/ icon arrays. We wanted to show that this was about individuals and give an idea of the scale of the human effort involved in putting together these reports I think grids of dots do that (grids of dots are one of my go do ways to visualise stuff, I love grids).

a series of bars comprised of dots coloured by whether the author they represent is from the north or south. It shows how global south representation has roughly quadrupled since the first report cycle in 1990

Old versions (2023)

Here are some charts I made for a previous iteration. One thing that stands out straight off the bat is that we've got a lot more consistent in our use of colour and type. This has been one of my goals since arriving at CB and it's nice to look back and see we've made progress.

Also, in this case we were dealing with fewer reports so were able to use columns instead of horizontal bars and overlay the line chart. If you're showing growth with a line the up=more association is so strong and that doesn't really come across if you have to rotate it, right=more is fine intellectually but I don’t really feel it, hence separate charts in the newer iteration.

A chart showing that IPCC reports now have a record number of female authors but men still dominate

A chart showing that Global south representation in IPCC reports has reached a record high

A chart showing that the physical science focused WG1 is the most male dominated

A chart showing that the solutions focused WG3 has the largest global south representation

30x30 climate pledges

About three years ago a bunch of countries agreed to set aside 30 percent of their land for nature by 2030 but…

More than half of countries have not committed to protecting 30% of their land and sea for nature by 2030 in plans submitted to the UN – despite signing a global agreement to do so less than three years ago ₅

I'm generally not so hot on thematic colours (in this case green=nature) but sometimes I can't be bothered to argue about it and our new chart colour palette has a green so why not? There’s often a balance to be struck between clarity and engagement.

I used a force directed layout to place the circles which lead to some label overlap issues but with the addition of some randomness in the starting positions and regenerating the graphic a few times we were able to find a solution that works. In the past I've saved layouts that worked as x,y coordinates and then reapplied them but given time constraints that didn't seem worth it here.

A charts showing countries, represented by circles proportoinal in size to their land area, and positioned vertically based on how much land they've pledged to set aside for nature, Algeria lead with 50% there are plenty at 30% (china, Canada etc) some straglers and then a set of countries below who have not pledged anything. Notably russia.

Workings

This went through quite a few iterations, we knew we wanted to show the area of the countries as well as their pledges, clearly Canada pledging 30% of their land to nature is more inpactful than eg Belgium. But figuring out a layout that worked took a while.

a montage of charts with various colour and layouts of proportional circles

I like the cross hatching and want to try that again sometime.

Site infrastructure

Finally: Digging through the depths of Google drive I found a document I wrote in April 2023 detailing how I thought our website infrastructure should be arranged with respect to AWS, Cloudflare, WordPress hosting etc. I was pleased to see that most of the plans had actually come to fruition. Working within an organisation (even a smallish one like Carbon Brief) it often feels like things never change but really it's just things mostly change too slowly to notice. It's nice to be reminded that plans do happen. In fact, that's one of the reasons for this blog. I want to have a record of work I've done but also I want to be able to reflect on what's changed in my approach and sensibilities and what things have stayed the same.

Tom P Worknotes