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 a comparative visualization in colormap stripes for all countries across the globe that can easily be conveyed, compared and understood even by nonspecialists. It proposes a novel and simple measure of what is referred to as ‘greening prosperity stripes’ and defined as the ratio of real gross domestic product per capita to carbon dioxide emissions per capita, based on annual data from the World Bank since 1990. We illustrate our findings along various time-series and cross-section perspectives acknowledging that images and colors speak louder than words and affect emotionally, thereby hoping to raise awareness of the dangerous level of emissions and mobilize immediate climate policy action worldwide. Moreover, the greening prosperity indicator by country, possibly updated online every year, could be used to track progress toward the goal of net zero clearly and compellingly.