Description
Climate change communication to the public sphere is crucial to raise awareness and motivate climateaction. Yet, balanced climate narratives are difficult. The challenge lies in the complexity of the topic itself, usually oscillating between robust evidence-based messages with low impact and emotionallypowerfulbut hyped stories. This offer proposes an application that facilitates the use of the ClimateData Store (CDS) data products for the creation of effective and emotionally impactful climate changemessages to be used by one of the major players creating narratives about climate change: journalists. Climate narratives, created by words, data, and images, are critically framed by the media. Journalistsare not only the mediators of climate data with the general public, but they are also opinion-makersand knowledge brokers for policy and business audiences.
However, having climate data is not aguarantee for journalists being able to create a good climate narrative. 49% of data stories are createdin a day or less according to the Google News Lab survey issued in 20171, and more than a half of therespondents signalled cleaning, processing, and analysing data as a skill difficult to pick up thatrequired too much training. The Climate Media Portal aims to provide journalists with an applicationthat allows them to create tailored and compelling visualisations using three key products (ERA5reanalysis, ECMWF S5 seasonal forecasts and CMIP5 projections).
These products will help enricharticles with climate information for the past, the near-term future and the long-term future whilesimplifying the interface and interaction with the CDS. The application will be co-designed in closecollaboration with journalists, creating a co-design group that will participate in the creation andtesting of the prototypes. This is fundamental to ensure that the design and the data provided isactually relevant and salient to the needs of journalism, besides ensuring it provides added valuecompared to other available applications.Recently, we have seen how successful visualisations of climate information (such as the climatespirals from Ed Hawkins2 or the Earth Temperature Timeline by Randall Munroe3) have rapidly becomeviral, regardless of the origin of the information they use.