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The Banks Funding Carbon Bombs

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Project Type

Data Visualisation

Date

Nov

2023

Design Tool

Adobe Illustrator

Graphic Tool

RawGraphs 2.0, Flourish

Analytics Tool

Excel

Source

Carbon bombs 💣 are fossil fuel projects that will emit more than 1 gigatonne of CO2 in their remaining lifetime. As of today, there are 425 carbon bombs in operation or about to operate. If they all go through, they will emit DOUBLE the amount of our remaining carbon budget 😱 .

With COP 28 happening in 22 days, I really wanted to do a vis showing how much money is being pumped into fossil fuel projects. These carbon bombs alone have already received 1.8 trillion dollars 💵 in investment. In comparison, UNFCCC's Green Climate Fund has raised less than 1% of this.

I designed the graph to look like a bomb exploding to emphasise that if these projects go off, there will be climate breakdown. But in the same vein, if we can either cancel them or phase down projects, we might still have a chance. So depending on how you want to see it, the visual can look like a bomb exploding 🤯 , or a tree growing 🌳 .

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