How much carbon is released by tropical deforestation? A LOT.
For the international climate conference in Paris, I teamed up with artist Jamie Denburg, the Global Landscapes Forum and my team of insanely smart experts at World Resources Institute to visualize carbon emissions through something wonderfully tangible: balloons.
We literally took high-resolution satellite imagery of carbon stocks, overlaid them with deforestation data, took the number of emissions and converted them into a circumference, then translated that into many centimeters.
Each balloon is perfectly representational of a country’s total emissions from deforestation, carbon emissions from other sources as compared to deforestation, primary forests and protected areas, and more!
