For Rio+20 with love…

One of the main features of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) was to highlight seven key themes as a part of its “Future We Want” campaign. Since one of the themes was on Disaster Resilience, UNISDR wanted to highlight the 20-year impact of disasters since the original Rio Earth Summit back in 1992. It was a way to say “hey, all this progress in sustainable development might just have been wiped away with disasters”. The aim of it all was to show that sustainable development and long-term progress isn’t possible without thinking about how to reduce the impact of disasters like earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes.

Keeping with the brand colors of the organization, the idea for this infographic came out of pouring through the CRED statistics on disaster events. While most of the graphic is just a fine-tuning of bar graphs and typography, the top three cumulative stats was more about using symbology that was representative of the stat. The first symbol speaks for itself, the second was about how international aid is about helping countries to build (i.e. building blocks), and the third is a comparison of the deaths in a recognizable ‘container’ (i.e. airplane). The graphic can be found on Flickr.