Greening prosperity stripes across the globe

This paper is motivated by the urgency of climate change mitigation and the crucial importance of communicating the need for it. Our approach relies on using comparative visualizations in terms of maps and stripes in color for all countries across the globe that can easily be conveyed and understood even by nonspecialists. It proposes an intuitive novel measure of what we refer to as ‘greening prosperity stripes’, defined to be visually comparable across countries over time along a brown-to-green pallette depicting the ratio of real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per capita, based on annual data from the World Bank since 1990. We illustrate our findings along both cross-section and time-series dimensions, acknowledging that images and colors speak louder than words and affect emotionally, thereby hoping to raise awareness and mobilize immediate climate policy action worldwide. Moreover, the greening prosperity world maps and stripes by country, possibly updated online every year, can be used to track progress toward the goal of net zero clearly and compellingly.