Data visualisations have become an important way of communicating climate change<\/a>. Warming is represented through colours, emissions through lines and bars, and floods and fires through maps and animations. These visualisations can make an enormous and complicated problem easier to understand, but they can also shape how people feel about it. <\/p>\n Crucially, some visualisations don\u2019t tell the full story.<\/p>\n I explored this in my new research<\/a> with 34 social media users in the UK and Poland. I showed participants climate data visualisations and asked them how they felt and what they did with the information. Participants described worry, fear, sadness, anger and concern, but also curiosity, surprise and pleasure suggesting that visualisation can make unpalatable data more enjoyable<\/a>.<\/p>\n The warming stripes for Poland (above) is a visualisation that shows temperature changes through coloured stripes. One participant said this visualisation looked \u201cso pretty, nice and interesting\u201d. But once they understood what the colours represented (red for warm temperatures; blue for cooler temperatures), their reaction changed, and the image became upsetting. The visualisation did more than show climate change: it changed how the participant experienced it.<\/p>\n What data visualisation leaves out<\/p>\n One of the most revealing moments in my research came from a meteorologist from Tonga who used to live in the UK. They first saw the warming stripes visualisation shared on social media, but Tonga was not shown as a location. They commented on the visualisation, asking whether stripes could be created for Tonga. They wanted to see what was happening at the scale of individual islands. They then went to the interactive version<\/a>, where users can select locations to create their own stripes, but they could not create one for Tonga because the data wasn\u2019t accessible for specific islands.<\/p>\n The visualisation showed temperature changes across broad regions, including the Pacific. But the participant wanted to see what was happening at the scale of particular islands. That visualisation prompted them to think about what could be done. They shared it with colleagues, and they decided to reproduce something similar using their own data.<\/p>\n Temperature changes around the world (1901-2021). The problem was not that the global visualisation was inaccurate. It was that accuracy at a global scale did not guarantee visibility at a local one<\/a>. For communities such as those on Tonga (an island that contributes only a fraction of global emissions yet bears the brunt of climate change<\/a>), this local visibility matters.<\/p>\n So who are visualisations making climate change \u201cvisible\u201d for? For the participant from Tonga, climate change is closely connected to land, the sea, community and everyday life. They explained that data visualisation needs to reflect local context yet engage audiences more widely to convey an urgent need for climate action.<\/p>\n What happens after seeing the data<\/p>\n Climate data visualisation is not just a technical exercise. Researchers usually ask whether a graph is accurate, clear and easy to understand<\/a>. But we should also ask who is represented, who is missing<\/a> and whose experience the data allows us to see. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/file-20261008-50-43duk5.jpeg\")
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\n Ed Hawkins\/University of Reading<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/p>\n