Building a situation room for the planet

The Challenge?

The Global Commons Alliance reached out to 3 Sided Cube as they wanted to create a dashboard to showcase the planetary emergency at COP26 and communicate with the population using near real time data.

With climate change being one of the biggest challenges we face as humans, Global Commons Alliance were keen to bring this concept to life using data journalism – the combination of data and technology from earth.nullschool.net and Resource Watch with environmental news articles from Mongabay and NowThis Earth. The team needed expert guidance and wanted to use our experience to create a dashboard that was easily digestible.

The Solution

With a team scattered across the world, 3 Sided Cube worked in an agile way as the product needed to be launched by COP26 so the process had to be really flexible. The final iteration was an interactive web platform, Earth HQ, that enabled the population to better understand the data, for example, what pressing disasters were happening and what this meant for the earth’s health. You are able to navigate and add layers to the earth to gain real information about what is happening all over the globe. 

The Global Commons Alliance were keen to speak to audiences throughout COP26 and raise awareness of the planetary emergency to inspire global action. With the launch of the Global Commons Alliance Earth Dashboard at the newsroom at COP26, the platform received over 30,000 users over the course of the 2 weeks event and has now reached over 40,000 users in total.

The Earth HQ site is currently in beta. Over the coming months the site will be optimised for mobile, and new features will be added.