With a bit of a short notice, I produced this infographic for a Swedish journalist who interviewed Margareta Wahlstrom, UNISDR’s ‘commander in chief’, on the impacts of disasters and climate change. It’s based on an MS Excel chart that was produced to highlight overall disasters in the Asia-Pacific region. The journalist wanted to reproduce the chart from a global perspective and only with climate-related disasters. Margareta suggested to see if we can highlight a large period to show an overall trend. You’ve gotta love statistics that have been collected and maintained over a large amount of time! It can really say a lot (if shown and explained properly)…
Using this criteria, I went back to the CRED EMDAT statistics to find out how they classified climate-related disasters. These were the four main indicators of ‘climate’ type disasters – floods, drought, storms and extreme temperatures. Since the most dramatic of the information was the 30-year trend, I made the graph take up as much real estate as possible. To balance the trending lines and white space, I used the 2008 Humanitarian Symbol Set – a very useful set of icons and symbols for humanitarian activities – to make the total number ‘pop’ and place for your eyes to be drawn to. Finally, I color-coded the symbols, the lines, and table text to have a consistently throughout the graphic. One thing suggested by my friend was to add the total number of disaster events per year… something to remember for the next time. You can find this infographic on UNISDR’s Flickr account.