When a climate disaster happens, people thousands of miles away may encounter it through numbers: how many people died, how many were displaced, how many homes were destroyed and how much infrastructure was damaged. But for the people living through it, the disaster is not a dataset. It is a home, a family, a livelihood and a place.

Billions of people around the world live in places and situations that are highly vulnerable to climate change, such as parts of Africa, Asia and small Pacific islands.

Data visualisations have become an important way of communicating climate change. Warming is represented through colours, emissions through lines and bars, and floods and fires through maps and animations. These visualisations can make an enormous and complicated problem easier to understand, but they can also shape how people feel about it.

Crucially, some visualisations don’t tell the full story.

I explored this in my new research with 34 social media users in the UK and Poland. I showed participants climate data visualisations and asked them how they felt and what they did with the information. Participants described worry, fear, sadness, anger and concern, but also curiosity, surprise and........

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