Mapping Out Our Future: Using Geospatial Tools and Visual Aids to Achieve Climate Empowerment in the United States

Abstract

AbstractUrgent climate action is now impeded less by doubt that the climate crisis exists than doubt that we can do anything meaningful about it. Vivid stories of climate successes and geospatial maps showing the impact of such successes are the best way to meet this challenge. Accelerating climate solutions in the United States thus now turns on stories, maps, and other analytic and visualization tools to help achieve what the United Nations has termed climate empowerment, the “all-society” effort to mobilize all people of all nations to understand, gain the capacities for, and take the actions needed to save our planet and each other. In this chapter, we look at two types of narratives—those in the form of geospatial tools and images that help nonspecialists see and understand climate dynamics and distributional impacts of the climate crisis, and interpersonal solution stories that act as resources to help motivate collective climate action. Illustrative and analytical geospatial tools support community members in shaping climate action and environmental planning efforts, and help to ground climate adaptation processes in geographically specific data. In combination, these storytelling tools carry people over the entire arc of climate empowerment.