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 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. 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 to produce a product ready for COP26. 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 raise awareness of the planetary emergency to inspire global action. With the launch of the Global Commons Alliance Earth Dashboard, the platform received over 30,000 users in the first 2 weeks of launch and has now reached over 125,000 users in total. Its now a regular stable at COP, making an appearance at COP27 and now COP28. 

The Earth HQ site is now live and has been optimised for mobile, as well as new features around event trends and news search. Over the coming months, we will be focusing on illuminating the science around planetary boundaries and tipping points.