Abstract
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 escalated a conflict that began in 2014, resulting in massive casualties and the largest refugee crisis since World War II. The war has also disrupted global food and energy trade, significantly impacting the environment, including damage to critical infrastructure, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and dire consequences on biodiversity and environmental health – connecting the war to climate change. Effective communication is crucial in helping the public understand and feel engaged with these complex topics. This study aims to understand how the research communities and broader media have linked the war to climate change, how this connection has been visualised, and what can be learned from the approaches. We surveyed 1192 papers or articles from ten research and media venues. We collected 202 data visualizations, 59 from articles connecting the dimensions of the war and climate change, concluding that energy is the most explored topic, with finance/commerce also significantly represented, and that data visualisation strategies used are limited in narrative and chart types. The study leverages this knowledge to propose implications for the design of future climate change interactions.
Keywords
data visualisation, climate change, war, data narratives, communication design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.431
Citation
Ferreira, M., Nunes, N., Ceccarini, C., Prandi, C.,and Nisi, V.(2023) The Russia-Ukraine war and climate change: Analysis of one year of data-visualisations, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.431
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
fullpapers
Included in
The Russia-Ukraine war and climate change: Analysis of one year of data-visualisations
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 escalated a conflict that began in 2014, resulting in massive casualties and the largest refugee crisis since World War II. The war has also disrupted global food and energy trade, significantly impacting the environment, including damage to critical infrastructure, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and dire consequences on biodiversity and environmental health – connecting the war to climate change. Effective communication is crucial in helping the public understand and feel engaged with these complex topics. This study aims to understand how the research communities and broader media have linked the war to climate change, how this connection has been visualised, and what can be learned from the approaches. We surveyed 1192 papers or articles from ten research and media venues. We collected 202 data visualizations, 59 from articles connecting the dimensions of the war and climate change, concluding that energy is the most explored topic, with finance/commerce also significantly represented, and that data visualisation strategies used are limited in narrative and chart types. The study leverages this knowledge to propose implications for the design of future climate change interactions.