FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

How the White House Built the Best Climate Change Website Yet

The website for the latest and most terrifying Climate Assessment Report is one of the best I've ever seen. One of its lead designers explains how it was built.
Image: NOAA, via the NCA

How do you build a website that politely and comprehensively informs the public that they are facing a vast, existential threat? One that communicates a looming "American Doomsday," as NBC describes it? A site that actively engages millions of citizens and that provides a comprehensive database for policymakers about the scale and nature of the dangers posed by climate change?

That was the task posed to the US Global Change Research Program and the private contractor Forum One, the institutions charged with rolling out a platform for the federal government's latest—and by far the biggest and most ambitious—National Climate Assessment. The last high-profile government website the Obama administration rolled out wasn't exactly met with critical fanfare, so it must have been something of a relief when the fawning reviews for the climate site started rolling in.

Advertisement

This is actually one of the best designed, clearest articulations of climate change I've ever seen.

— Philip Bump (@pbump) May 6, 2014

"The feedback we've heard has been almost universally positive, which makes me distrustful of it," Michael Rader, a project manager with Forum One, told me in an email. Rader has been involved with the site's design process since its inception a year ago. An acquaintance of mine who doesn't follow climate issues described the end product as "informative/useful."

But I have to agree with Mr. Bump; I've sifted through a lot of climate reports online in my day, and this might be the best presentation I've seen. The most fundamental science and urgent impacts are creatively outlined right up front, in a Highlights section: Interactive graphics show us plainly how rising carbon dioxide levels correlate to rising temperatures. We see the stunning Arctic ice melt in a hands-on tool that compares cover today to decades past. We get graphs, charts, and brief, well-written captions.

The internet responded. While the report itself made front page news on every major newspaper besides the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, those charts and graphics flooded editorial sites around the web in the form of listicles (Mashable's "7 Charts That Show How Climate Change Is Already Altering Life in the US" is a perfect example) and media-heavy articles.

That was just part of the platform's aim. "Scientists and policymakers can drill down into the report, or the data via our Browse section or the GCIS," Rader wrote. "Non-experts can learn the basics of climate change in the Understand section, or use the Explore section to look for information on their region a specific topic. People that are very interested in climate change can follow news and engage with the public opportunities in the assessment process. And everyone can drill down into the report."

Advertisement

These online experiences are, obviously, increasingly crucial for effectively disseminating official information, which is why I was so interested in hearing Rader's take. He was kind enough to write me an eloquent, essay-length email answering many of my questions about the process, so I've often quoted him at length here. His perspective is enlightening both in respect to the world of climate science communication and developing media as a government contractor.

"As is the case with a lot of .org and .gov websites, we had to balance the content needs of several distinct audiences, from climate scientists to city planners to average people. We solved this problem by breaking the site content into conceptual sections (eg Understand, Explore, etc). A lot of the content is still forthcoming, but we've built the framework that will allow a lot of future expansion," Rader wrote, and "it was clear when we started working with the GCRP staff that they had a lot of ambition and plenty of ideas. Their mandate is to provide facts about climate change science, impacts, and response options, and they wanted a site they could build on and expand over time."

Two of the less publicized forthcoming functions included on the newborn, Drupal-powered site are a sort of transparency index, the Global Change Information System (GCIS), which "allows anyone to view the source research for the NCA and browse the relationships between various products and people in different areas of global change research." The government also hopes to use the site as a technology to facilitate collaboration between the scientists who contribute to it.

Which is interesting. But it's still the effective interactivity and smart organization that brings the threat of the NCA alive. As we spend larger and larger chunks of our days online, idly clicking through blog posts and social media updates, whether or not important new science and policy receive even 30 seconds of our time depends on the quality of the web platform it's delivered on. And put simply, this one delivers.

While Rader couldn't give me specific numbers, he told me that his team "estimated and planned for a six-digit number of unique visitors in the first 24 hours, and we significantly exceeded that."

Of course, there's only so much an exhaustively researched, incredibly transparent, and highly interactive climate change website can do—the science-denying crowd will still wipe it away with a dismissive sneer and a mumble about a 'pause' in warming. But for anyone who cares to look, the goods are there.

"[I]t's an opportunity to advance the climate issue that is at least ostensibly outside the traditional partisan framing," Rader says. "The website's job is to say 'This is what's happening, and here's how we know.'"