Atlas of Climate Change aims to empower non-experts with facts
Facts on Climate Change, a Czech team of independent analysts and experts, is committed to making the public debate on climate change factual, constructive and based on scientifically verified data. They recently published an English version of their Atlas of Climate Change, which was previously only available in Czech, to provide teachers, students, journalists, influencers, and political and business decision makers across the world with easy-to-use maps, explainers and infographics that summarise key facts about one of the greatest challenges facing our civilisation today.
Ondráš Přibyla has a technical background in a field laughably opaque to most of us – theoretical physics – that led him to learn about the physics of climate change. But, unlike your stereotypical theoretical physicist, he is also interested in communication, mediation, and how to resolve conflicts.
“When the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C was published in 2018, I read it and wondered to myself what could be done with it. Because I understand the science, but the science needs to be translated and communicated in a way that makes it approachable and understandable for people from non-scientific backgrounds.”
The concrete impetus for founding Facts on Climate Change came when he realised that people who want and even need data and information on the topic don’t have access to it – at least not in an easily digestible way.
“A landmark moment for me was during the School Strike for Climate student protests in 2019. I was curious about how journalists would report on it, so I went to one of the strikes and asked some reporters what materials they had looked at. They told me they’d studied the protest schedule. So it was clear that journalists would report on how many students attended the protests, what slogans they used – the simple things that are easy to find out. But when I asked them whether they’d looked into how many degrees the Czech Republic had warmed up by, they said they didn’t have time for that kind of research. And that was one of those lightbulb moments when I realised: ‘I know where that data is, and I know it would be possible to get it all together and present it.’ Facts on Climate Change really came about from that moment, when I saw that the information is out there in principle, but it’s not out there in a form that is digestible or easy for people to use.”
The eventual result was the website Facts on Climate Change, and the organisation that Přibyla founded continues to do analyses of temperature data, energy transformation and other areas related to climate change.
The first ‘Atlas of Climate Change’ came out four years ago, but until now was only available in Czech. This year the team released an English version – and it is not just a direct translation of the Czech version either.
“The English version doesn’t focus so much on Czechia specifically – I think there is no infographic in there that is purely about Czechia. The data are either about the EU, from Eurostat, or they’re global open data from NASA, the IPCC, and other scientific institutions that measure this kind of thing. On our website you can find direct links to the original data sources, so you can check that everything is correct.”
Although climate change is often seen as a depressing and hopeless topic, full of gloomy facts about our inevitable demise, Přibyla is an optimist who also researches transformation strategies.
“For the first time in human history, we have the technology and the money to make society sustainable and prosperous at the same time. That wasn’t possible before, because the only way to produce enough energy to have a prosperous society was necessarily unsustainable – by burning fossil fuels. But in the last 10 or 15 years, technology has developed to such an extent that we can create a society that is both sustainable and prosperous. That change is now possible.”
You can download the Atlas of Climate Change for free as a PDF or buy a printed version. The PDF version is free to use, share and modify for non-commercial purposes and can be printed out. If you choose to buy a printed book, your order will help to make the creation of new materials and further updates possible.
