Climate-KIC partnership wins data visualisation category at this year’s Royal Statistical Society awards

The COP21 calculator has won an important award from the Royal Statistical Society based in London, UK.

The COP21 Climate Change Calculator was co-created by Climate-KIC and the Financial Times. Its methodology was developed with funding from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and by a team based at Imperial College London and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The partnership worked together to launch a new modelling tool which was published in October 2015 in the Financial Times. The climate calculator allows the user to track and project the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from: China, US, EU, India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Australia and the Rest of the World (RoW), over the period 1870 to 2100. China, US, EU, India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and Canada are the highest GHG emitters of the world, which together with Australia, accounted for two-thirds of global GHG emissions in 2010.

The FT received an extremely positive response to the tool on Twitter, including specialists in the field, and it quickly became one of the paper’s most-shared interactive pieces of the last few of years.

The award read “It (Climate Change Calculator) condensed a vast amount of numerical information into a very simple tool, and did so without compromising on the representation of uncertainty”

Aled Thomas, Interim UK Director for Climate-KIC UK and Ireland said “We are particularly happy that we could be part of a team that designed an important tool for climate change that is easy to use and, at the same time, scientifically robust”.