vizzuality

[vizzuality]

Why spatial matters in the fight against climate change.

Data Science and GIS go hand in hand against climate change.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer. 

You can also read this blog on Medium.

The problems we work on — like climate change and biodiversity loss — are transcendent. There’s no single solution to these problems, so we must bring together different communities and fields of work to find them. At CARTO’s Spatial Data Science Conference 2020 (SDSC20), Vizzuality’s Greta Carrete Vega and Luisa Teixeira discussed how Data Science and GIS go hand in hand in the fight against climate change.

To prepare for SDSC20, Greta and Luisa gathered some of our data science and GIS experts to talk about our own experiences of two disciplines working together. The group realised that their diverse range of backgrounds and experiences means they can see things from different perspectives and challenge each other’s biases. Different views can complement each other, and shine light into our dark spots.

When it comes to problems as big as climate change, having the space to talk and understand the changing issues is important. CARTO’s SDSC20 is one of those places. As Greta and Luisa say in the discussion, we (as individuals) cannot learn everything. We can’t be the repository of all knowledge. We can’t know everything. Therefore you need a team around you, and you need to be inclusive of all the skills and experiences people have to offer. If we work in the spaces where problems intersect, that’s where we’ll find our solutions.

Hear the full discussion in this YouTube video. Listen to the end for advice from Greta on how to get started in spatial data science.

Curious to see more examples of different disciplines working together? Maybe you’ll like this blog about our designers and user researchers working together with the Resource Watch team to redesign the platform’s ‘Explore’ page.

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Welcome, Pablo!

Pablo is the first person to join Vizzuality since the Nueva Normalidad began. Now that we’ve switched from remote-friendly to fully-remote, there’s no real life introductions (or beers in Calvin’s) but that hasn’t stopped Pablo from meeting all his teammates. A completely revised onboarding programme developed by our People & Culture aims to keep us all connected, even when we’re apart. 

Joining us from a creative communication consultancy, Pablo is an experienced Project Manager. He works with our team and our clients to successfully achieve their goals, and find new needs and problems to be solved. Perhaps it’s his ability to listen and ask questions, or his positive attitude, but he’s quickly settling into his role. Pablo has already taken the lead on important projects and contributed to our internal transition towards self-organisation.  

Pablo has experience in Inbound Marketing Strategies and UX/Ui design, a degree in Biological Sciences, and a Masters in Digital Marketing and Social Media Strategies. He loves to learn something new all the time. A few months ago he took some time to learn about interior design and plants. He loves to study photography too. Pablo spends a lot of his time playing sport, and he used to earn a living scuba diving. 

For Pablo, working with Vizzuality is an opportunity to surf the wave of digital transformation in sustainability communication and visualization. Roused by his curious mind and eagerness to learn, we’re excited to see what this could mean for us, our clients and the success of global efforts to make sustainable choices the norm. 

Welcome to the team, Pablo!

[vizzuality]

American fires.

Record-breaking wildfires are burning in the USA — again.

Sometimes, it seems to me that extreme wildfires are a recurring theme in our global headlines. Australia. Brazil. California. But why? Is what we’re seeing unusual? Or are we seeing a pattern that will repeat itself if we fail to act on climate change?

To understand what’s happening and how it affects our society, we need data. And for that we have access to open data platforms. Through these platforms we can stay informed, predict the future, and make plans to protect the things we love.

Using Global Forest Watch, Resource Watch, and PREPdata to explore the data, it’s clear that this year’s fires in the USA are worse than normal. And what’s more, there are signs that things could get worse.

Read the full blog on Medium. 

This widget compares the number of cumulative VIIRS fire alerts in 2020 to 2018 — and shows that the number of fire alerts recorded in 2020 will likely pass the number recorded in 2018.  The map on the right shows the location of all fire alerts in the past three months. Source: Global Forest Watch, accessed 21 September 2020 https://gfw.global/35TjboJ.

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Remote workshops for (a) change.

Oscar Esbri. Scientist.

At Vizzuality, we regularly have workshops with our partners at different project stages to meet, align, share ideas, and design work plans. However, travel restrictions have made us adapt to the new normality and make all of our workshops fully remote.

As we cancelled our flights and revised our agendas for two in-person workshops originally planned for March, we realised that all the activities we had planned did not translate well into a virtual world. So when we re-designed the workshops, we didn’t seek normality. We simply adapted to the new situation with the tools and knowledge available to make the most of our remote collaborative work.

Read our advice on how to organise an online remote-first workshop on Medium.

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Mangrove deforestation alerts available for the first time.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer, Vizzuality. 

For the first time, data on mangrove deforestation, carbon storage and coastline protection are easily and freely accessible online. Global Mangrove Watch — a mapping platform — highlights the importance of mangroves and provides the data that are needed to inform conservation and restoration planning. With this information, decisions can be made to mitigate climate change and protect the livelihoods of billions of people who live in, and depend on, coastal areas.

Global Mangrove Watch explores the science behind remote sensing. Scientists from Aberystwyth University, soloEO, Wetlands International and The Nature Conservancy and a host of other partners joined together to provide the data. We were asked to design and build the platform, and provide Scientific support.

Read the rest of this blog on Medium. 

Map showing the extent of mangroves in Indonesia. Image from Global Mangrove Watch. 

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Playing with fires.

Adam Pain, Scientist. 

Wildfires are a hot topic right now. Last year it was California, Australia and Brazil making headlines. Bolivia too was struggling to slow the spread of forest fires across its Protected Areas. This summer we’ve seen huge swaths of forest lost in Arctic Siberia as well as record-breaking fires scarily close to urban zones in Arizona.

With global temperatures rising each year and precipitation patterns becoming more extreme, it’s clear that the monitoring of fires will play an increasingly important role in protecting our forests. 

So to that end, Global Forest Watch (GFW) has released a suite of new widgets to give users a sharper set of tools to monitor and analyse fires as they happen. I want to walk you through the new capabilities and show you some of the things you can do with them. Let’s take a look at some specific examples that are fresh in our memories.

Read the full blog on Medium. 

[vizzuality]

How we made Resource Watch even easier to use.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer. 

Design and user research go hand in hand when it comes to product development. Both are essential if you want to make a product that is useful, usable, and used. We’ve been working with the Resource Watch team at World Resources Institute (WRI) on a redesign that makes planetary data easier to use.

I spoke with Dani Caso (Designer) and Martin Dubuisson (User Researcher) to find out more.

Read the blog on Medium! 

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Welcome, Tamara!

Scuba diving is one of the major reasons why Tamara, a Scientist who joined our team in December 2019, took an interest in marine biology. She was captivated by the diversity of life underwater and their evolutionary adaptations. Tamara joined our team shortly before her wonderful daughter Maya arrived in the world. For Tamara, the weeks before her maternity leave were a great opportunity to familiarise herself with all our projects and ways of working. Now she’s back, she’s jumped right into her project work, including the Half-Earth Project. Tamara’s role is to provide high quality data analysis that can be applied in purposeful ways. 

Tamara’s excited by the prospect of working on products that promote changes in our society and address environmental challenges. She’s also excited to work with all the different disciplines our team represents—designers, developers, and researchers—and learning from our multidisciplinary approach. 

Before she joined us, Tamara was a Scientist working in academia. Firstly in the Atlantic Ocean in Spain and then in the Red Sea with a Postdoctoral fellow at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. She has two Masters: one in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation; and a second in Secondary Education Teaching. Tamara’s also on the cusp of finishing a third Masters degree in Big Data and Science. Coupled with her PhD in Biogeosciences, this combination of studies has developed Tamara’s skills in communicating science and helping others understand complex topics. 

As you might expect from someone who’s studied the ocean, Tamara is a big fan of outdoor activities, especially scuba diving and hiking. From coral reefs to caves she feels very comfortable in the underwater peace and silence. Each place has its own special little things. Tamara also loves to take four day hikes, camping out under the stars and carrying nothing more than the things on her back. 

Welcome to the team, Tamara! 

Tamara, a coral-loving marine Scientist. 

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Have better online discussions.

AJ Pain, Scientist. 

A few months ago, Vizzuality’s Science Team switched our weekly in-person meetings to full-remote. After noticing that online discussions don’t always flow as well as in-person conversations, we decided to reflect on how things are working. We’d be terrible Scientists if we didn’t measure things!

So, a couple of weeks ago we sent a survey to every person in the Science Team. We asked for their thoughts and feelings on the state of discussions, team spirit, load balancing, and team direction in light of these changes. Over the next weeks and months we plan to take a deeper dive into each of these themes. As we do, we’ll evolve the way we do things now we are fully remote.

This week the focus was discussions. After highlighting the issues we face, we identified four ways to make our online discussions better.

Read the rest of the blog on Medium. 

Photo by Alphacolor on Unsplash.

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Bolivia burned while the world watched Brazil.

The Amazon was on fire. Now we know how much was lost.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer, Vizzuality. 

In August 2019 the world’s eyes were focused on Brazil. The Amazon was on fire and social media was burning up in indignation. The data available at the time told us how many fires there were, but they couldn’t tell us how much forest had been lost. Today, we can finally answer that question. The release of the 2019 tree cover loss data from Global Forest Watch reveals the data we’ve been waiting for.

Global overview.

In 2019, we lost 3.8 million hectares of primary forest — the equivalent of losing one football pitch of primary rainforest every six seconds for the entire year. 2019 was the third-highest year of primary forest loss since the turn of the century.

Global primary forest loss and total forest loss remain stubbornly high despite decades-long efforts to reduce global deforestation. Graphic created by Vizzuality using: Tree Cover Loss (Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA). Accessed 3 June 2019.

Read the rest of the blog on Medium. 

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Global Forest Watch just made it even easier to monitor forests.

Powerful, personalised forest monitoring.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer, Vizzuality.

The latest update of Global Forest Watch offers a more powerful and personalised way to monitor forests. Working closely with our partners at World Resources Institute, we’ve upgraded the Global Forest Watch dashboards. Now you can create dashboards for any area in the world to answer specific questions on where, why, and how much forest change has happened.

The covid-19 pandemic has ignited fresh debate on how we use our forests. Our ever-encroaching expansion into pristine forests is exposing vulnerabilities we’d rarely given thought to. But with demand for beef, soy and other commodities rising, we can’t ignore the environmental impacts of our appetites. Twenty six percent of deforestation is due to demand for commodities — and Global Forest Watch helps us keep track of it.

“Supporting those monitoring and protecting the world’s forests has always been a top priority for GFW,” said Alyssa Barrett, Global Forest Watch Platform Manager, World Resources Institute. “These latest updates, developed in collaboration with Vizzuality, put forest change — in any area — into context, making it easier to find anomalies and monitor trends over time.”

Read the full blog on Medium.

Figure 1. The pink pixels reveal tree cover loss is happening within Tinigua National Park. The pink pixels show the location of GLAD deforestation alerts between 2015 and 2020. Global Forest Watch: https://gfw.global/3bQfmA9

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Tracking the impact of Covid-19 on people’s lives in Africa.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer, Vizzuality. 

Covid-19 affects the whole world but not everyone’s experience will be the same. In sub-Saharan Africa — where only 15% of the population had access to a basic hand washing facility with soap and water — people are particularly vulnerable. Inequality in our society means low income levels, lack of healthcare, and inadequate education remains a reality for many, and they are ill-equipped for the consequences of a pandemic. Governments and civil society organisations have to make careful, difficult decisions that balance the need to protect people’s health and their incomes.

To ensure those decisions have positive impacts, decision makers need data they can trust. In Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, that data is being provided by FinMark Trust and insight2impact (i2i) and their partners. Data for Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia are being rolled out shortly. They are conducting telephone surveys to find out the impact covid-19 is having on people’s livelihoods — and they asked us to design and build a platform that makes the gathered insights more accessible and easier to use.

Read the rest of this blog on Medium. 

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Applying design to supply chain data.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer, Vizzuality. 

Supply chain data are complex, multilayered, and sometimes hard to untangle. When it comes to using data to make decisions, design has a crucial role in ensuring data are efficiently understood. With the right presentation and interpretation, supply chain data can be transformed into actionable insights that lead to more sustainable, more secure, and more robust supply chains.

For three years now we’ve been collaborating with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Global Canopy Programme (GCP) to visualise supply chain data on Trase.Earth. The platform currently provides data and insights on 13 commodities from eight countries. As the number of platform users increased, the experience and needs of those people diversified too. From journalists revealing the links between burgers and deforestation to companies wanting to understand the environmental impact of their supply chains, people across the world are using Trase to understand the links between forests and the food on our plates.

So, after a careful review that included google analytics and research by the Engagement Team at Global Canopy that included interviews with people who use the platform, we embarked on a redesign that provides more guidance to first time users and offers faster access for all users. In this blog we’ll review some of the goals we wanted to achieve with the redesign, and explain how they make complex data easier to understand.

Follow this link to read the rest of the blog on Medium. 

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Social justice in crisis management.

Compassion & intersectionality in times of Covid19 and climate breakdown.

Melanie Herrmann, HCI Researcher. 

You’re isolating as best as you can, while your housemate uses every chance to drag the dog out for yet another walk. Some countries put strict curfews into place and penalise breaches with hefty fines. Other governments don’t.

What is the correct behaviour? What is fair on the societal level? Covid19 is the tragedy of the commons. We have to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. We need as many as possible to comply with quarantine measures for the global community to come out okay on the other side.

I am a psychologist consulting for a tech company that has designed a lot of famous Geographic Information System platforms for social and environmental causes, such as Global Forest Watch. I see common themes across the various crises we are facing as a society.

Put simply, these themes are the very common sense ethics we teach our children: compassion and fairness. Starting off from the Covid19 crisis, let’s reflect on humane principles that ought to inform global crisis management.

Read the rest of this blog on Medium. 

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Welcome, Daniel!

On Daniel’s first day at Vizzuality, the entire team went fully remote. But despite the physical distance between us, Daniel’s role within the People and Culture team is helping us feel more connected than ever before. 

Working closely with Sebastian, Daniel provides extra support to the whole team as we adjust to the life-changing impacts of the coronavirus. In addition to his mindful support, he’ll help recruit and onboard new teammates and assist Laura and Liuba with finance and operations activities. Daniel is looking forward to, “working with an amazing group of people in a company with the most powerful mission that I have ever come across.” 

Before joining us, Daniel was the Office Manager & Operations Coordinator at Bitnami, a tech company working on cloud applications. He took care of the office and its employees, improving processes and creating internal guides. Daniel is currently studying an online MBA course. He has also studied Hotel Management and Hospitality, and worked in the hospitality industry for many years, which means Daniel is organised and great at developing relationships. 

Daniel comes from Huelva, a small city in southern Spain. One of this town’s many claims to fame is its football team, Recreativo de Huelva, which is the oldest football team in Spain! The team was founded in 1889 by two Scots who worked in the mines there. In his free time Daniel likes to go to the gym, but since he can’t right now, he’s been encouraging our teammates to stay active with simple routines that will keep our muscles moving. 

Welcome to the team, Daniel!

[vizzuality]

The Transition Years.

An optimistic vision of our planet’s future.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer. 

The Transition Years is an experiment that provides insight into how we can end the current climate emergency. From grassroots initiatives to corporate and government actions, there’s evidence of efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change from across the globe. The Vizzuality team collected these actions to build an imagined timeline that depicts the collective positive impacts of global efforts. The result is an optimistic but evidence-based scenario that gives us hope for the future.

When this experiment began, we asked ourselves, “what will our future look like in the context of global change.” “What actions can slow the trend of increasing temperatures?” With each new example of citizen action, climate policy, and technological advance that we gathered, we began to see a more optimistic future. The change that’s needed to reduce carbon emissions and stabilize global temperatures is already happening.

We created this scenario before the severity of the Covid-19 crisis became apparent, therefore the as-yet-unknown impacts of it are not considered here. However, we still believe there is much to learn from the initiatives and actions highlighted by our visualisation. The consequences of the seismic shift we’ve seen in recent months, weeks, and days are a stark reminder that ‘business as usual’ isn’t good for people or the planet. Nature has sent a warning call. It’s time to listen and act.

View The Transition Years here.

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Coronavirus, climate, crisis, and compassion.

When we respond to crisis, we need to remember compassion, data, and optimism.

Camellia Williams, Lead Writer.

I began writing this blog in an almost empty office at 7pm on Tuesday 10 March. Normally the office reverberates with noise as people wrap up their work for the day and chat about their evening plans. But on that day it was eerily quiet. Almost everyone either stayed home or left early. As they departed they said, “see you when I see you.”

The night before, Madrid’s government had announced all the schools would close on Wednesday for two weeks. People were advised to stay home and work remotely. Non-essential travel was discouraged. By morning the shelves were stripped bare and people were fighting over pasta. The behaviour I’d mocked other cities for had arrived on my doorstep.

The video in this tweet was filmed in the supermarket where our Madrid team buys their lunch.

As I stepped out of the office and into the dusk, I was surprised to see so many people still out and about. The terraces were full of people having a beer and tortilla. Where was the hysteria I’d been seeing online? In a city of 6.5 million people, there are many responses to a crisis. And not all of them are visible online.

What I’m learning from a city that changed its behaviour overnight — and is now in total lock down — is how we should respond to a crisis. It doesn’t matter if it’s Coronavirus or Climate Change, there are three things we need to remember: Compassion, Data, and Optimism

Compassion.

Compassion is “a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering (and your own) which is accompanied by the motivation to help.” In this situation you feel concern for another person, but you don’t make their distress your own. Instead you find an appropriate way to help.

For example, while some people have responded to the Coronavirus by hoarding toilet paper, others are taking a more laissez-faire approach to life and continuing with their usual habits. The young and healthy are being told not to worry, so they are out and about carrying on as normal. That’s great for local businesses. But what about the people who are old and have health conditions? What’s the best way to protect people from both infection and the mental health impacts of social isolation?

The death rate for anyone under 39 is just 0.2% but for our parents and grandparents, the rate increases up to 14.8% for the over 80s. Before lock down I worried about getting infected; what if I passed the virus on to someone who is recovering from an operation, is being treated for cancer, or has an existing respiratory condition? These are three real scenarios for me and it scared me. We all know someone who is vulnerable.

Compassion motivates us to make decisions that will help others as well as ourselves. That’s why so many people are staying home, even if they aren’t yet forced to by their government. If you can, just stay home.

Being aware of how a crisis impacts other people is what makes me cringe when I see people celebrating the reduction of carbon emissions while the world shuts down. The Coronavirus is “the worst way to drive down emissions” because people are dying and some can’t afford to stock up on food or pay for medicine. The closure of businesses and factories is causing an economic downturn that will affect every single one of us.

Furthermore, it’s unlikely that the Coronavirus will meaningfully reduce the dangers of climate change. Carbon emissions dipped during the last global economic crisis but nations responded by increasing output once the crisis was over.

In any crisis, be it Coronavirus or Climate Change, we need to find solutions that remove people from harm, not make them more vulnerable.

Climate change will disproportionately affect low-income countries and poor people in high-income countries, which threatens human rights such as the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being. We need to learn from the choices we’re making now, and have more empathy for people who don’t have the same privileges as those of us who are WEIRD [White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic]. My teammate Melanie is writing a great blog about mapping for the 99% and how we can have greater empathy for them. We’ll publish it the coming days.

Data.

To make the right choices, we need data. Reliable, trusted, accessible data. I’ve written before about the importance of critical thinking and the need to question the source of the information you’re looking at. Advice from the Colegio Oficial la Psicología de Madrid on coping with Coronavirus anxiety reminds us to ask ourselves, is the data I’m seeing truthful? Has it come from a reliable source?

Our World in Data is one source I’ve been referring to for up-to-date data on the spread of the Coronavirus. They use charts to display the data and text to explain the visuals. Presenting data in a way that is easily understood by the target audience is key to effective data visualisation.

When Anne Maria Darling saw people weren’t grasping the concept of ‘flattening the curve’, she added cats to make it more appealing to those who prefer to communicate with memes. The ‘lazy kitty’ analogy works purr-fectly as a message to stay home, relax, and help reduce the spread of Coronavirus.

Cattening the curve.

Optimism.

To overcome a crisis we must remain optimistic. Whether that’s seeing self-isolation as an opportunity to read that book you’ve been wanting to read for ages, or a chance to improve your company’s remote working policies. When we imagine a more positive future it becomes easier to spot the opportunities that will take us there. That’s why I’m writing this blog right now, because I had to turn a negative into a positive. If you’d read the first draft of this blog you’d be curled up in bed and crying by now.

Our team is testing new ways to connect with one another while we stay at home. Last week we celebrated a teammate’s birthday with a virtual happy hour. It was awesome to watch everyone’s face light up as we chatted about movies, books, and how to move our outside life online.

Our team is now fully remote and we connected for an all-hands meeting via zoom on Monday 16 March.

More than ever, our team knows we must continue our efforts to accelerate the speed at which positive change happens for our planet. Once the worst of the Coronavirus crisis has passed, the Climate Crisis will still be there. We will still need to protect biodiversity. We will still be fighting for equality. This huge shift in the way society functions is our chance to be more compassionate, more creative, and more open to new possibilities.

At the heart of every crisis you will find a personal, emotional turning point. A moment when the solution to a crisis is finally born. Are you there yet?