An image of NASA's Earth Information center. Two people are standing in front of a large wall-sized display showing a grid of colorful maps. The people are facing the grid and one of them is gesturing to it. At the left side of the display, there is some text describing the maps alongside an image of the globe showing the locations of numerous satellites. At the right side of the display, there is a large image of a river, seen from space, as well as a handful of statistics about global warming.

Data Dashboards at Earth Information Center
https://earth.gov/

A data visualization discussing the Carbon Dioxide footprint of airplane travel. At the left side of the image, there is a series of annotated maps documenting the author's recent travels from Boston to Paris, which released a total of 1 ton of Carbon Dioxide. The author then goes on to explain that they travelled a total of 110,900km in 2016, which (moving to the center of the image) produced 23 tons of CO2. The author then calculates that the average CO2 emitted per person on Earth is 5 tons per year. Moving to the right side of the image, the author then compares their emissions to the average person, which is further broken down by the average person per country. The author then goes on to explain that according to the Paris Climate accord, each person would need to reduce their emissions by 85%, which would allow for them to (only) take 1 trans-atlantic flight a year, and have no emissions left over for electricity usage or heating.

CO2 Footprint
Benjamin Bach

A data visualization showing the Carbon Dioxide footprint of various activities. At the top, there is a chart labeled 'a. Logarithmic Scale', which has a bunch of different icons, placed at different points on a logarithmic scale of CO2 emissions by weight. At the bottom, there are three charts labeled 'b. Categorical encoding of weight units and piece-wise linear scale' which has the same chart, but broken up into 3 sections, labeled 'grams', 'kilos', and
'tons', respectively.

Designing Visualizations for Enhancing Carbon Numeracy
Katerina Batziakoudi, Florent Cabric, Stephanie Rey, Jean-Daniel Fekete

A screenshot of 'Data Comics for Climate Change'. At the top of the screenshot, there are two panels. On the left, there is a panel depicting a bunch of annotated graphs with climate information on them. On the right, there is a comic strip of a variety of people discussing climate change. At the bottom, the title of the work can be seen in large white text on a blue background.

Data Comics for Climate Change
Zezhong Wang, Stephan Gruber, Claire Herbert, Zandria Sarrazin, Michelle Levy, Sheelagh Carpendale

A screenshot of the Earth Mission Control. A bunch of floating panels are arranged in a semi-circle in virtual reality, in front of a black background. The topmost panel says 'Welcome to Earth Mission Control' in large text. Underneath it, there is a panel displaying a visualization of satelites orbiting a spinning globe. To the left of the semicircle of panels, there is a large globe. At the top left of the image, overlayed on the virtual reality environment,
there is a stair-shaped icon next to the text 'mit media lab'.

Designing Earth Mission Control: An Immersive Data Visualization Tool for Climate Communication and Decision-Making
Minoo Rathnasabapathy, Rachel Connolly, Phillip Cherner, Jaden Palmer, Dava Newman, Mark SubbaRao

Two pictures displayed side-by-side. The left picture shows an art installation of a large amount of primarily blue and yellow items arranged chaotically on a white wall. The right picture shows an image projected onto the side of a building. In large text, it says 'FROM GREEN TO RED' and 'AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTEST'. Above the text, there are images of what appear to be blood vessels.

Artists, Data and Climate Change: Distilled messages, multiple entry points, layered metaphor
Francesca Samsel, Bruce Campbell

Viz4Climate + Sustainability: IEEE VIS 2024 Workshop on Visualization for Climate Action and Sustainability

Half-day workshop on October 14th, 2024: 8:30am - 11:30am EDT
IEEE VIS 2024 Conference, Virtual
Important Hurricane Information from General Chairs

About

Join us for the IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for Climate Action and Sustainability. This workshop aims to explore and consolidate the role of data visualization in accelerating action for addressing environmental challenges and climate change. Given the urgency and impact of the environmental crisis, we ask how our skills, research methods, innovations and visualization practice can help by empowering people and organizations. We believe visualization holds an enormous power to aid understanding, decision making, communication, discussion, participation, education, and exploration of complex topics around climate action and sustainability.

Read, download, or cite the full work proposal.

Please cite this work proposal as the following:

Bach, Chevalier, Kostis, Subbaro, Jansen, Soden: IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for Climate Action and Sustainability, IEEE VIS Conference 2024, St. Pete Beach, FL

Workshop Goals

Collect research, case studies, examples, and experiences around working with visualization in the broad area of climate and sustainability. See our submission types below and submit your latest work.
Discuss and explore the potential of how visualization knowledge and research can help address issues around climate change and sustainability by supporting stakeholders in monitoring, decision making, communication, education and advocacy.
Understand challenges and opportunities for visualization research and practice, i.e., which are the problems the field needs to study and explore solutions for; and which are the gains we can drive for our general understanding of visualization from working on climate and sustainability.
Build a community of practitioners and researchers across all fields of visualization and associated areas (e.g. machine learning, climate science, education, advocacy). We particularly encourage (future) collaboration among the attendees.

Besides brief presentations of the accepted submissions, the workshop aims to mostly focus on discussions and planning research through novel collaborations.

Program

The workshop takes place virtually on October 14th, 2024, 8:30am - 11:30am. All times listed below are in EDT (Eastern Daylight Time).

Session 1 (70 minutes)
8:30am - 8:40am	Welcome - Benjamin Bach, INRIA and Helen-Nicole Kostis, NASA
8:40am - 9:10am	Topic 1: Storytelling and Communication Chairs: Benjamin Bach, INRIA; Fanny Chevalier, University of Toronto; Mark Subbarao, NASA

8:42am - 8:48am	Local Climate Data Stories: Data-driven Storytelling to Communicate Effects and Mitigation of Climate Change in a Local Context Fabian Beck, Lukas Panzer, Marc Redepenning
8:48am - 8:51am	Data Comics for Climate Change Zezhong Wang, Stephan Gruber, Claire Herbert, Zandria Sarrazin, Michelle Levy, Sheelagh Carpendale
8:51am - 8:54am	Designing Visualisations for Enhancing Carbon Numeracy Katerina Batziakoudi, Florent Cabric, Stephanie Rey, Jean-Daniel Fekete
8:55am - 9:10am	Questions, answers, and discussions
9:10am - 9:45am	Topic 2: Immersive & Tangible Chairs: Fanny Chevalier, University of Toronto; Benjamin Bach, INRIA; Yvonne Jansen, CNRS

9:12am - 9:18am	Eco-Garden: A Data Sculpture to Encourage Sustainable Practices in Everyday Life in Households Dushani Perera, Nervo Verdezoto Dias, Simon Lannon, Julie Gwilliam, Parisa Eslambolchilar
9:18am - 9:21am	Designing Earth Mission Control: An Immersive Data Visualization Tool for Climate Communication and Decision-Making Minoo Rathnasabapathy, Rachel Connolly, Phillip Cherner, Jaden Palmer, Dava Newman, Mark SubbaRao
9:21am - 9:27am	AwARe: Using handheld augmented reality for researching the potential of food resource information visualization Nina Rosa
9:30am - 9:45am	Questions, answers, and discussions
9:45am - 10:00am	Coffee break
Session 2 (70 minutes)
10:00am - 10:25am	Topic 3: Analytics & Transparency Chairs: Mark Subbarao & Helen-Nicole Kostis, NASA; Yvonne Jansen, CNRS

10:02am - 10:05am	Interactive Visualization of Ensemble Data Assimilation Forecasts for Freshwater Floods Ameya Patil, Marlee Smith, Helen Kershaw, Moha El Gharamti
10:05am - 10:08am	Urban Computing for Climate And Environmental Justice: Early Perspectives From Two Research Initiatives Carolina Veiga, Ashish Sharma, Daniel de Oliveira, Marcos Lage, Fabio Miranda
10:08am - 10:11am	Exploring the Reproducibility for Visualization Figures in Climate Change Report Lu Ying, Yingcai Wu, Jean-Daniel Fekete
10:12am - 10:25am	Questions, answers, and discussions
10:25am - 11:00am	Topic 4: People, Art, and Engagement Chairs: Helen-Nicole Kostis, NASA; Benjamin Bach, INRIA; Fanny Chevalier, University of Toronto

10:27am - 10:33am	Cultivating Climate Action Through Multi-Institutional Collaboration: Innovative Data Visualization Educational Programs and Exhibits for Public Engagement Beth Altringer Eagle, Elisabeth Sylvan
10:33am - 10:36am	Harnessing Visualization for Climate Action and Sustainable Future Narges Mahyar
10:36am - 10:39am	Artists, Data and Climate Change: Distilled messages, multiple entry points, layered metaphor Francesca Samsel, Bruce Campbell
10:39am - 10:45am	EcoViz: co-designed environmental data visualizations to communicate ecosystem impacts, inform management, and envision solutions Jessica Kendall-Bar, Isaac Nealey, Ian Costello, Christopher Lowrie, Kevin Huynh Nguyen, Paul J. Ponganis, Michael W. Beck, Iklay Altintas
10:45am - 11:00am	Questions, answers, and discussions
11:00am - 11:30am	Closing remarks & Open Discussion

Topics and Questions

The large scope and complex nature of the multi-faceted problem of visualization for climate action and sustainability is best addressed in an half-day dedicated, informal, interactive workshop that brings together diverse contributions, viewpoints, and reflections on the topic, followed by discussions.

The workshop encourages submissions around a broad variety of topics, challenges, and questions including (but not limited to):

How to balance visual complexity, depth of information, and visual/data literacy?
How to understand abstract and widely unfamiliar scales of time, space, and numbers?
How to encode, inform and present efficiently uncertain data? How to deal with heterogeneous data sets (spatial, temporal, relational, multidimensional, 3D, 4D, etc.)?
How to make model projections more accessible and actionable for a general public?
How to tailor information and visualization to diverse audiences?
How to work with policymakers and communities at risk?
How to create empathy with current and future people and populations?
How to support carbon accounting and monitoring systems?
How to track and monitor the circular economy?
How to support decision making on a personal as well as collaborative level?
How to foster engagement and participation on a community level?
How to leverage new and immersive technologies for analysis, communication, and awareness?
How to train the creators of visualizations?
How to prevent the misuse of visualization for this topic and provide for critical engagement?
How to make conferences and our own research practice (e.g., computing power, physical materials, devices, etc.) more sustainable?

For some of these questions, we can start from the techniques and knowledge we have gained about visualization in general—others might require entirely new ways of thinking across information visualization, scientific visualization, analytics, illustration, information design, human-computer interaction, education, cognition, etc. Addressing these questions can lead to guidelines, collaborative platforms, visualization principles and techniques, toolkits, method- ologies, visualization activities, analysis methods, interactive spaces and experiences, games, and potentially many more.

Workshop History

This workshop builds on the 2022 Viz4Climate workshop at IEEE VIS 2022, co-organized by Helen-Nicole Kostis, Mark SubbaRao, and Marlen Promann.

Organizers

Main contact:

Benjamin Bach

Inria & The University of Edinburgh, France / United Kingdom
Fanny Chevalier

University of Toronto, Canada
Helen-Nicole Kostis

NASA/GSFC & USRA/EfSI, USA
Mark SubbaRao

NASA/GSFC, USA
Yvonne Jansen

CNRS, France
Robert Soden

University of Toronto, Canada