Innovative communication and usage of IPCC Reports: Insights from the Interactive Atlas
Authors: Sitz Lina Elisabet , Iturbide Maialen , Gutierrez Jose Manuel , San Martin Segura Daniel 
Published: March 2024

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are increasingly being used by various stakeholders in different ways. These reports serve as a tiered set of products, effectively providing reliable information relevant to diverse contexts for a broad audience. However, communicating the full extent of available information on future climate, including uncertainties, may hinder its adoption. In this context, it is crucial to find new communication mechanisms that enhance information relevance by simplifying complex content. This type of approach requires the ability to obtain reliable information, integrating various levels of complexity in a dynamic and versatile manner.
One of the novel aspects of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) was the creation of the Interactive Atlas (IA), an innovative product containing the underpinning data for numerous chapters of the Working Group I report. The tool integrates global and regional datasets in an interactive interface, enabling users to explore historical changes and future projections in climate variables and indices. This set of features positions the tool in a unique situation, offering potential users the ability to create customized graphic and visual materials with reliable information, aligned with the findings of the latest IPCC report. In particular, it provides background information on regional climate change serving as an expert knowledge base for crafting targeted narratives and climate information helping in the process of creating specific climate narratives and storylines.
During the development of this tool, a key challenge was to provide information that could be interpreted by users with diverse backgrounds. To address this, two alternative interfaces were designed: a simple one, for the general public, media, educators, and decision-makers (focused on climate futures); and an advanced one, tailored for researchers and practitioners. The various tabular and graphical representation options in the tool facilitate the interactive exploration of information from different perspectives and levels of detail.
To enhance the applicability of visuals in the IA across diverse audiences, recent insights from various scientific disciplines, including cognitive and psychological sciences, have been considered. Besides the standard visual products typically used for communicating global and regional climate information to practitioners (e.g., maps, time series or scatter plots), the IA incorporates new visuals, for example, &#8216;climate stripes&#8217;, facilitating the communication of key messages (e.g., warming and consistency across models) to a less technical audience.
More than two years since its launch, the products obtained through this tool have proven to be highly valuable as support for generating innovative ways to communicate relevant information in climate change. These applications range from interactive articles in mainstream media, to multimedia material, teaching and educational material and scientific outreach products. Alongside the main functionalities of the current version, we present here an analysis of how this tool has been used for these purposes, along with an introduction to its evolution and the development of the new Interactive Atlas in a project within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), &#160;a non-frozen tool allowing for the incorporation of new functionalities tailored to user requirements over time.