Maps for a changing planet — Part 2
Location tools for engagement and mobilization
This week, we’re highlighting projects from nine builders who are using data and maps as part of their responses to environmental issues locally and globally. Our first post looked at translating complex data to make it personal.
By: Elijah Zarlin
When it comes to successfully mobilizing a lot of people to take action to drive change, those people have to understand why their action is important.
Creating the relevance and resonance that drives individual engagement can be difficult on issues like pollution and resource consumption on a global scale. Hotter temperatures, melting ice, deforestation, species loss — these are by definition massive, diffuse. How does one person’s activity fit in?
Maps and location can help drive personal connections to vast data, and these tools are also a powerful resource for mobilizing people. From logistics to storytelling, these three projects use location in different ways to engage audiences and spur action.
Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef: Reef Tracks
Reef Tracks is the latest project of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef. It uses satellite tags to track the movements of various reef animals — sharks, turtles, manta rays, and a whale shark, with more on the way. While Reef Tracks does facilitate data sharing among scientists, its primary intention is to bring people around the world closer to the Great Barrier Reef and participate in its protection.
In contrast to the many grim headlines about the reef, Reef Tracks takes a beautiful and hopeful approach to exploring the data of the Reef as it exists today. As developer Som Meaden explains:
I’d like to think that the balance we strike reflects the reality of the situation. The Great Barrier Reef isn’t done yet — in fact far from it, it’s still one of the most awe-inspiring places you’ll visit on earth! But it also represents one of the first potential catastrophes of climate change (and human indifference). Our content is informative, we don’t pull any punches. But it’s also always intended as a call to action, and action demands hope.
Som builds and maintains a diverse portfolio of map-based projects and campaigns — from maps that describe coral reproduction, to volunteering opportunities, to a plastic-free pledge campaign. One of his tricks? Use Mapbox Studio to design and deploy a common base style across multiple maps, with everything else formulated on the fly using Mapbox GL JS.
This allows us to easily (and visually) update common elements across all our maps, including features like the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park boundary, and key points of interest such as islands, reefs and major cities, without the need to redeploy, duplicate code, or create over-engineered components. Too easy, mate!
Greenpeace Russia: Crowd-sourced air pollution
When Greenpeace was planning a new campaign to raise awareness about how widespread air pollution is across Russia, they knew they needed a map. It had to not only communicate the distribution of the problem, but also encourage action by visualizing local air quality complaints.
They designed the map to handle a lot of very different data sources: expected sources of air pollution (like traffic congestion and industrial areas), data from existing air monitoring stations, and crowdsourced reports of poor air quality. After only 3 weeks, Greenpeace has received over 1,500 reports about air pollution from across the country.
It is an unusual map. The bright yellow icons of air quality complaints stand out like warning signs against the dark purple and black map style. Project lead, Vasily Yablokov, explains how they approached map design with engagement and emotional response in mind:
We wanted complaints to stand out — to see how many people are saying there’s a problem, that this is a big problem and not just a few people. We want the government to see that air pollution is reaching a level where they need to respond.
Youth Climate Strikes: Strike Map
From its start in September 2018 with Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, the Youth #ClimateStrike movement is elevating the voices of young people demanding action on climate change. When the youth leaders organizing the US Youth Climate Strike on March 15th reached out to the Future Coalition for assistance with communications and operational management one of the key things that volunteers built was a new map to visualize and propel the growing number of strikes.
“Should I go?” and “Who’s going to be there?” are the fundamental questions of social engagement, and the map resoundingly answered both. The new map and site improvements were a major boost to the campaign: the number of strike registrations tripled in mere days thanks to the great visibility and the simplified event registration process. Overall, 424 student strikes took place across 45 states. The climate strikes were a huge global event, as seen from the Snap Map view at the top of this post.
Beth Robertson, one of the Future Coalition volunteers, sees the map as a key piece of the campaign’s engagement strategy.
It makes the events themselves more visually accessible when people are searching for an event to join, and the overall map helps to show the scale of the movement across the country.
The effort to build the new map also brought improvements to the campaign’s data management. Organizers can now maintain the information in a simple Google spreadsheet, making it easy to collaborate and check the data for duplications or errors.
The map updates automatically from the spreadsheet, thanks to Python code running in the cloud several times a day, as explained by developer Kimberly Nicholls in this detailed how-to post from a previous iteration of this map architecture built for MarchOn. The Climate Strike iteration is now a template that can be easily replicated for future actions.
Elijah Zarlin (@elijahion) | Twitter
The Mapbox Community team partners with world-changing organizations and individuals using location tools to help solve social and environmental challenges. Are you building maps for environmental campaigns? Get in touch!
Maps for a changing planet — Part 2 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.