From Points on a Plot to People in a Place: A Visual Exploration of Climate Vulnerability

This interactive exhibition enables an exploration of multiple types of data collected as part of the Climate Change Local Adaptation Pathways project (see https://climateadaptationpathways.iihs.co.in), describing climate change vulnerability and adaptation.

The exhibition will include a touchscreen interface, a few explanatory posters, maps and photos in the display area. The main digital interface will have an interactive scatter plot showing clusters of households depicting the summary of patterns in hundreds of variables. Users can see what defines and separates the clusters, and how they overlap. When you select any single point (household) in the scatter, the view zooms closer into that one household's actual story. You see an anonymised profile with household structure, housing characteristics, asset ownership, education and employment details, migration status, etc. The goal is to show what the numbers actually mean on the ground. It demonstrates how the quantitative survey, qualitative information, remote sensing data, and other secondary datasets all come together to tell us the full story.

This exhibition lets us explore the same reality described at different levels of aggregation and detail. It is very interesting to switch between the levels and understand what kind of information gets highlighted at which level.

The combination of data used in the exhibition strongly tells the story of each place and community. Patterns of climate adaptation are local, and rooted in the culture of the community and the resources available to them. Ecological/agricultural changes are often visible in the stories that this data lays out.

The project aims to directly measure climate change adaptation and resilience, so the context fully aligns with the two key themes of the exhibition. We also contextualise human data with data on environmental, agricultural and natural resource data, which also overlaps with the "more than human data" theme.