5 interactive ways news outlets are covering climate change

Most news organisations have been covering the numerous changes surrounding climate change in the run up to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Kicking off in Paris on Monday for ten days, the event will bring together world leaders to discuss the implications of this global phenomenon and what measures can be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the planet.

So how are news outlets providing context to this ongoing issue to their audiences to help them better understand the causes and effects of climate change, especially considering people's habit of consuming news on their mobile devices?

Here are five examples of coverage from The New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg Business, Financial Times and the The Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times

At the end of October, NYT published a piece looking at Greenland's melting ice sheet, caused by climate change, and the impact it could have on the natural ecosystem by increasing sea levels.

Scrolling down through the article allowed people to immerse themselves in a map of Greenland as they read the related information, to finally arrive at the exact point where the scientists quoted in the article had set up camp during their summer investigations.

NYT also included video footage filmed with a drone in the interactive. Although this wasn't the outlet's first use of a drone in reporting, the photographer behind the piece wrote about his challenges in working with the technology and how it has "opened a new path for readers to experience the stories".

NYT published a follow-up interactive on the same topic yesterday, this time focusing more on photography and additional drone footage to give readers a peek inside the remote Summit Station, a climate research centre based in Greenland.

A snapshot of the NYT's Greeland footage filmed with a drone


The Wall Street Journal

The WSJ created an interactive map showing the different levels of nitrogen dioxide across Europe and how polluted the air is in specific countries or cities due to emissions produced by diesel cars.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk about the piece back in October, WSJ graphics editor Elliot Bentley said the map was a follow-up of the Volkswagen scandal, which had been extensively covered by most media outlet in the previous month.

To create the map, Bentley used geolocated data collected by the European Environment Agency from 4,000 air quality monitoring stations in Europe.

The idea behind it was allowing readers to look at the bigger picture around pollution, but also to draw comparisons between certain countries and drill down into individual locations, such as their neighbourhood.

Bloomberg Business

For members of the audience who might not have followed the topic of climate change regularly over the years, Bloomberg created a data visualisation to analyse which natural factors have contributed to global warming throughout time and to what extent.

The graph initially shows a line of the average land-ocean temperature measured since 1880 until 2005.

Scrolling down, or clicking through the different factors on the side, will add additional lines to the graph, explaining how the impact of a given factor, such as deforestation or volcanic activity, adds up to the measured temperature.

The graph also allows the reader to contrast and compare between human factors, natural factors or a combination of the two categories.

The graph shows that human factors contributing to global warming match scientific observations

The Guardian

The Guardian chose to focus on a particular region and the impact that multiple factors, including deforestation, have had on the lives of some of the 70 million people living in the area, and on climate change as a global phenomenon.

Published yesterday, the interactive tells the story of Mekong in Southeast Asia, the twelfth-longest river in the world.

The piece is divided in six chapters, which combine text, video footage, interview soundbites and images to give readers a more comprehensive overview of how climate change is affecting different aspects local life: energy, food and urban development.

Financial Times

The FT built a climate change calculator to show readers "what the world is really doing to stop climate change". It allows the outlet to use the calculator as a main link between any past reporting and future coverage of this issue in the run up to the Paris conference.

As countries have been publishing the measures they plan to take for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the interactive aimed to show how different levels of pollution caused by these emissions could improve or worsen global warming.

The calculator enabled readers to create their own model by playing around with the figures pledged by a number of countries, to see, in real time, how a bigger or smaller number of cuts could affect climate change until 2100.

Users were also able to set targets for each country and they were encouraged to share their results on social media platforms.

The FT's climate change calculator, showing different numbers according to the readers' predictions for each country

The GIFs in this piece were created by the author using Giphy.

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