A GRAPHIC EXPLANATION: 25 YEARS OF CLIMATE TALKS
Background: More than 190 nations are gathering in Paris on 30 November to broker an agreement to mitigate climate change. A previous attempt to shape a global agreement fell apart in 2009 in Copenhagen. Now the world is ready to try again, and for the first time, all countries are poised to take action. But the history here is sobering: the quest to build a global climate treaty has hit many obstacles over the past 25 years.
Design challenge: As part of our coverage, we thought a history of climate negotiations would be essential reading. But who wants to curl up with a rather complex and frequently frustrating recap of the last 25 years? (I don’t know about you, but this topic tends to launch me into an existential crisis.)
But when editor Rich Monastersky pitched the idea of telling the story in a graphic novel style, we all agreed that would be a fantastic way of visualizing climate history in a distinct way, and would allow for people, events and data to meaningfully intertwine.
The full climate comic can be found here (with a high res PDF here).
The first step was choosing an artist. After seeing Nick Sousanis’s amazing Unflattening - a doctorial dissertation in comic form that explores the idea of visual thinking – we thought that he would be a perfect fit for the project. In my view, the scope, complexity and profoundness of the topic required a unique way of working with images and metaphor. To our delight Nick agreed, and we set a target of an 8-page story, to be created jointly by himself and Rich.
Co-creation. A key challenge for this project was the process of co-creation, the blending of words and images by two creators with equal input to create a single narrative. Do words drive our thinking and framing of reality, or images? Which comes first? Nick and Rich tell their stories:
“Words and pictures convey meaning in distinct ways. And I think for me, the comics that work best are the ones where the relationship between the two is part of the makeup of the work from the very beginning. We don’t start with words and then illustrate with pictures, the two do a dance together as we try to get a handle on the idea – allowing each to do its part and inform the other in service to that.
Each page is designed with a consideration for the whole – how do all the parts fit together to make it a cohesive unit. Unlike working in text, where adding, moving, or cutting a paragraph can be done fairly easily, in comics this pulls apart the structure of the composition. It can be done, but all the parts then end up being affected and rethought to pull it back into balance. The quantity of text in comics is a challenge, as usually it works best in small chunks that move through the page. A single large block of it may be too heavy – not only leaving no space for images but also rendering itself unreadable due to its density (even if it’s actually quite short by the standards of a paragraph of prose).
One funny thing, I’d come up with a sequence of numerous mundane actions each of us does that contribute to pumping carbon into the atmosphere. And I’d included some text with it along the lines of “we all have a hand in it.” I knew what I had in mind and where I was going with it, but it wasn’t clear to anyone but me from my early rough sketches – so that line got axed. When I finally did the tighter images, Rich suggested that we should include something saying we all have a hand in it… I laughed. But I think this illustrates a key point. (See draft and final panel, above.)
Rich and I had a pretty dynamic collaboration marked by numerous lengthy phone calls and many, many emails exchanged. I think that was all necessary and clearly helped to make it a stronger work and have a better understanding of what we were trying to get across as we went. But those interactions all took place with words – spoken or typed, and I believe had we had an opportunity to engage with one another in person and talk with images, something different might have emerged and we might have gotten to places we arrived at later much sooner. Being able to work visually together, allows us to really keep those two perspectives talking to one another – and realize where the images can do most of the heavy lifting and where the words need to pick it up and fill the gaps.”
“In the summer of 2014, I started thinking about the Paris climate summit and how we might tell the story of the negotiations over the past quarter century. I had started my career in journalism in 1986 and so had seen both the treaty process and climate science evolve over that time. It struck me that a standard story wouldn’t adequately capture the slow but important action over the long span. At Nature, we are continuously experimenting with different ways of presenting stories and I wondered if a graphic-novel type approach might be the most natural way to tell this one.
Part of that meant going back to my ancient basement files. I had long ago purged most of my early paper records but had kept a few, including hand-written interview notes with NASA climate scientist James Hansen from the week in 1988 when he gave his famous Senate testimony. I also had a copy of the written statement he presented, which included a graph of global temperatures over the century.
I was thinking of a standard comic-style story that would portray the events in chronological order, peppered with details about advances in climate science. Nick Sousanis came on board as the artist this summer and brought his own style to the project. Nick excels at creating visual metaphors that operate on many levels and he came up with the idea of a framework motif that would run throughout the piece.
I did some interviews with people who had been involved in the negotiations from the outset and did a huge amount of background reading. Nexis was my best friend for a few months. I sent Nick a 12-page outline filled with events, pictures, quotes, people, graphs, and other ideas. That document ballooned as we added more ideas and Nick started to map out how we might distill a book-length project into 8 pages.
From there, the collaboration continued through email and a series of epic phone calls, including one 3-plus-hour session on a Saturday that must be the longest call I’ve made in decades, if not ever. We bounced ideas off each other for how to present the material in a compelling way and kept tweaking the concepts until the last minute before closing the story. Along the way, we received some invaluable feedback from Nature reporters, editors, and designers. All that adds up to a 9-page story that I don’t think either Nick or I could have envisioned at the very start.”
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