Infographic of the Day: Pollution Atlas
This detailed atlas by The Guardian takes a look at CO2 emissions and displays a country’s size by the amount of carbon dioxide it produces. As you can see the African continent appears to be significantly smaller compared to it’s actual size, whereas China and the US dominate the map (unsurprisingly!)
The map, is produced by Guardian graphic artists Mark McCormick and Paul Scruton. It shows a picture of a world where established economies have large - but declining - carbon emissions. While the new economic giant economies are growing rapidly. This newly-released data is from 2009 - the latest available.
The data is interesting and it is a clever way of viewing so much information, but my only criticism is that countries that emit smaller amounts of CO2, a fair number in Africa and South America, do not have their names alongside their circle. When using circles to represent data, you will always come across the issue of displaying labels when the circle gets small. Here, I’m a little disappointed to see, that country labels were merely just left off. Now, I’m not particularly familiar with the location of specific middle African countries, so when curious about which countries in Africa produce small amounts of CO2 I had to use the table at the bottom to cross reference the data… a very large table with very small text…
I like the graphic, I think it gets the point across well, I guess I just would have liked to have seen a cool way of displaying the country labels… maybe making it interactive would have helped here…
