How do you tie messages about carbon emissions and strategies, or waste and recycling challenges, to the real world? You need data - but data doesn’t speak for itself. Real World Visuals work convinces users that data does not need to be boring.

Way back in 2003 I made picture of all the water in the world. I was curious to see it all together and a bit surprised when I’d done the calculation to see how small it looked. Many other people were surprised too. “That can’t be all the water” they’d tell me confidently, “That’s just the fresh water”. But no – all the water in the world could fit into a sphere 1,391 km across (864 miles).

The fact that fossil fuels were included in the text from COP28 is cause for celebration. But scientists are warning that time is running out if we want to avoid widespread climate chaos. That means that communication of the size of the challenge is critical and should not be restricted to stories of climate breakdown.  We all need to get better at communicating ‘big carbon’.

Imagine a mobile pavilion in a city centre giving ordinary a real insight into the causes and effects of the climate crisis: A pavilion that links the human suffering and environmental damage caused by wildfires, flooding and heatwaves with actual amounts of greenhouse gases emitted in the past and today.  It will do this by bringing our concept of the Carbon Quilt to life.

Burning fossil fuels adds another 100 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every day*.  If this were a single layer of the pure gas at sea level it would cover the entire Earth with a blanket 100 microns deep - the thickness of a piece of paper.  And one Gigatonnne of CO2 would be almost exactly 1mm thick. Welcome to the Carbon Quilt, a new way to understand how we are changing the atmosphere - an intimate and human-scale visual tool for understanding global-scale carbon stories.