Cartogram Maps Provide New View of Climate Change Risk

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Cartogram Maps Provide New View of Climate Change Risk

Scientists have developed cartograms — maps that convey information by contorting areas — to visualize the risks of climate change in a novel way.

In a new study, a scientist developed cartograms that enlarge geographical places that host large populations and are particularly vulnerable to climate change hazards. The researcher also created cartograms that expand the shape of countries with higher greenhouse gas emissions and national wealth.

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A cartogram set that visualizes the risks of climate change due to decreases of renewable groundwater resources. The degree of climate change hazard (a decrease in groundwater resources by more than 10 percent) is indicated by color. The cartograms distort regions by expanding areas with large populations in 2010 and high degrees of vulnerability.
Credit: Petra Döll; Via AGU

Insights on climate change are often conveyed through thematic maps, where data on certain aspects of climate change is compared across different regions. For example, researchers have made maps that show how climate patterns have impacted or are expected to influence sea level rise, the changing seasons, and the economy.

Conventional thematic maps rely on color codes to convey climate change risk, but cartograms use both color and distortion to represent complex data. By using distortion as a communication tool, cartograms can visualize more information and potentially elicit a greater emotional response from the viewer, according to the new study detailing the new maps that was recently accepted in  Earth’s Future , a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

“Of course, I want to do the best objective science, but I also want my work to be policy relevant,” said Petra Döll, a hydrologist at Goethe University Frankfurt’s Institute of Physical Geography, in Frankfurt Germany and author of the new study. “My task is to present the results of my research in the best way possible and to also have a positive impact on the sustainable development of our earth."

Using geographic information system (GIS) software, a kind of technology commonly used for analyzing spatial data, Döll created cartogram sets that visualized climate change’s global impact on groundwater resources. Scientists estimate that 38 percent of the global population will experience declining groundwater resources by 2080 if the world fails to control carbon emission rates. Döll’s maps were based on multiple datasets that describe the level of hazard, exposure and vulnerability related to the planet’s decreasing amount of renewable groundwater resources.

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