Tuesday, October 01, 2019

UK Climate Emergency


Climate Emergency is a clever animated choropleth map which shows which councils in the UK have declared a climate emergency. More than half the local authorities in the UK have now declared a climate emergency.

By declaring a climate emergency councils are committing themselves to taking urgent action to reduce local carbon emissions. The UK government has set a 2050 target for the UK reaching zero carbon emissions. Many local councils want to reach this target 20 years earlier and have set a target of 2030.

Propolis' Climate Emergency is an interactive map which shows which political party is in control in each local council area. When you press the 'show me the split' button the map of the UK divides in two to show all those councils which have declared a climate emergency side-by-side with all those councils which have not yet declared an emergency. This animated split is an effective way to visualize the difference between the two sets of councils. In particular it is striking how many Conservative councils in the east of England have not declared a climate emergency. They obviously aren't concerned about rising sea levels.

The animation is controlled by d3.js and the data for the map is loaded via a GeoJSON file. It looks to me from a cursory glance at the code that it would be relatively easy to adapt this map to work with your own GeoJSON data.

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