Drawing on Paper #2 — Deforestation

Drawing on Paper is a weekly case study to visualize a topic. This week: Deforestation. Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the newsletter!

Courrier International

The following graph was published in the “Atlas of global warming”, a supplement magazine of Courrier International (Oct-nov 2021).

Excuse bad quality, I had to take a picture…

I found it interesting for many reasons. First, I wondered why the data looked like “steps”. Second, why is represented on a radial layout? Two interesting questions!

First, the shape of the data. When thinking about it, it makes perfect sense that the loss is the same for every decade of some periods. This data—since the 1700s—is probably quite hard to find and was certainly calculated on a longer period, then averaged to estimate the net loss for each decade. Nevertheless, the story is quite clear (and depressing): forests are going away. Splitting the data for each decade (even artificially) gives a more concrete feeling of change.

Then, the radial representation. It is a sunburst visualization, though it’s more…