The Secretary General of the United Nations has asked countries to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. António Guterres has also urged news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising. Part of the problem is that fossil fuel companies do not tell the whole story.

How do you tie messages about carbon emissions and strategies, or waste and recycling challenges, to the real world? You need data - but data doesn’t speak for itself. Real World Visuals work convinces users that data does not need to be boring.

The fact that fossil fuels were included in the text from COP28 is cause for celebration. But scientists are warning that time is running out if we want to avoid widespread climate chaos. That means that communication of the size of the challenge is critical and should not be restricted to stories of climate breakdown.  We all need to get better at communicating ‘big carbon’.

Imagine a mobile pavilion in a city centre giving ordinary a real insight into the causes and effects of the climate crisis: A pavilion that links the human suffering and environmental damage caused by wildfires, flooding and heatwaves with actual amounts of greenhouse gases emitted in the past and today.  It will do this by bringing our concept of the Carbon Quilt to life.

Burning fossil fuels adds another 100 million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every day*.  If this were a single layer of the pure gas at sea level it would cover the entire Earth with a blanket 100 microns deep - the thickness of a piece of paper.  And one Gigatonnne of CO2 would be almost exactly 1mm thick. Welcome to the Carbon Quilt, a new way to understand how we are changing the atmosphere - an intimate and human-scale visual tool for understanding global-scale carbon stories.

The climate crisis is now unfolding. Images of flooding, droughts, wildfires and heat waves are hard to avoid. But in order to genuinely engage we need to see the causes as well. The carbon emissions coming from human activities.

36.7 billion metric tons. That’s the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions in 2019. But what about if you could ‘see’ this number? Would it help ordinary people realise the extent of the challenge?

Humans are not good at responding to invisible threats. We react quickly if something with claws and horns charges towards us out of the forest, but anything invisible tends to be ignored.