Not obviously about homes this post; but we feel that being able to communicate environmental situations is important. Too often messages about climate change are abstract, difficult to picture and far too easily forgotten.
Not so with the work of David McCandless a London based author of Information Is Beautiful and designer. His ‘love pie, hate pie charts’ approach to presenting information gives a clear, simple and attractive representation to ideas and facts that may otherwise pass you by.
This excellent graphic shows how the Kyoto signatories are shaping up to their commitments as we approach the talks in Copenhagen designed to replace them.
The information comes from a European Environmental Agency report and neatly summarises 188 pages of rather dense data.
As you can see the UK scores extremely well along with Germany, Greece and Sweden whereas Canada, Denmark, Italy Scotland, Spain and Switzerland are well off target.
Another example of effective climate communication can be seen below. In Good Magazine Spanish designer Lamosca has given an excellent graphic that shows nations carbon increase or decrease from 2006 to 2007.
It is interesting to see that the UK has the largest decrease of 3.8%.
The government is also in on the act. Below is a map released last month by DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change). Created in collaboration with the MET Office Hadley Centre it shows the global consequence of failing to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius.
The full interactive version is excellent and well worth playing with. It can be found at the DECC website here.
Much of the current interest in climate change was created by the persistent use of a simple Power Point presentation (Al Gore’s famous Inconvenient Truth). If we are to continue to spread the message and understand its complexity graphics such as the ones above must become common currency in our media, schools and offices. The time has come to see the change.
Yes, there is no escaping the need to ‘invest’ in ‘zero-ing’ your home. And let’s be clear, we absolutely have to face up to that worthwhile truth. But, once completed, there is a potential return on investment. For example, householders who invest in energy generation technology such as solar panels, wind turbines or ground heat extraction solutions, will be able to ‘sell’ surplus energy back to the National Grid thanks to a special feed-in tariff that will come into play across the UK energy utility landscape from April 2010.
