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Researchers in Athens are working on predicting wildfires at the Penteri Observatory. However, last summer, the facility was engulfed in flames. Even the meteorologists who were working in the wildfires arrived nearer much faster.
It was mainly the lack of winds that saved the wider Athens from wider and devastating damage. Cities in a similar situation to Athens – urban areas that are extremely vulnerable to warming-related disasters, but have yet to see major disasters, have been described by climate scientists as “sitting ducks.”
The list of cities includes Dallas, New York, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Sydney and Cape Town. There is a risk of wildfires and flash floods there. Or – the worst case – both.
How did you make it
To create an interactive glove, I had to first geolocate every city that was emphasized as being at risk. This is a rather painless exercise and has the help of the excellent Geocode Awesome plugin available in Google Sheets.
Add a list of locations to a new spreadsheet, run the geocoding script, and the heypresto, latitude and longitude values will appear in the columns next to them.
The next step is to assign marker types to each city depending on the nature of the climate risk they are vulnerable to suffering. I designed these icons in Adobe Illustrator and saved them as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). The advantage of having icons in SVG format rather than JPG or PNG is that they remain sharp, as they are vectors rather than raster images.
(NERD Note: I have written about the differences between vector and raster images in my previous newsletter. If you missed it, please email me as cimatime@ft.com.
City and coordinate spreadsheets are imported into custom-made, thriving map templates that read this data and place icons and labels on the map. I chose the glove over the standard map projection, especially on mobile phones.
Census-level data was provided by Guidewire HazardHub for the Dallas flood risk map. GIS (Graphic Information System) files are over 15MB and are too large to thrive, so when you try to load them on your phone you will experience rendering issues.
I used mapshaper.org to reduce the size of the file. This is a free website where you can upload GIS data, simplify it and download it again. This simplified data was loaded into Prosperity, one of the many data visualization tools used in FT. Next, I styled the data with yellow/green/blue lamps that I found intuitive to the flood data.
Erin Cofran de Perez, a climate risk expert and professor at Tufts University, said the so-called sitting duck city has been “lucky” so far.
However, after showing unrelenting global warming from April to April, the odds against them have risen at 1.58c, with temperature rises over the past 12 months above pre-industrial levels.
Join business, finance and policy leaders dedicated to progressing towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals through collaboration, innovation and investment by participating in the Climate & Impact Summit held online in person with London from May 21 to 22. Important newsletter subscribers will get a 10% discount on your pass here.
