Climate change data you could use in your Arts Help grant proposal

As you'll know, we're partnering with Arts Help to give away $3.5m in individual grants to artists just like YOU, who want to create exciting art around climate change.

When looking at inspirational examples of art addressing climate change, we really liked the idea that Alicja Biała and Iwo Borkowicz when creating their 'Totemy' installation, pictured below.

The two artists used colors and patterns to reflect statistics and results of research into climate change. They took the data provided and translated it into art, creating enormous totem poles to display the information and draw attention to the cause.

Alicja writes: "Thanks to this, you can easily visualize, for example, the scale of tree felling, air pollution, or exploitation of fisheries. The forms of giant totems in bright colors attract attention not only because of their aesthetics - they are supposed to encourage and provoke interactions by passers-by." 

Thanks to the wealth of research into the climate change affecting our planet, there's a whole buffet of information, data and statistics that you could use if you're thinking of representing the facts through art.

Here are some further resources to get you thinking and inspire your proposal. Remember, Arts Help are giving away grants from $1,000, to $100,000, to quite literally any figure under $3.5m. 

Below are some legit wesbites which have a whole load of climate data you could use in your project or proposal. 

1. Climate.gov

This site has an enormous amount of factual information, and an entire area of the site devoted to Maps & Data. Even the 'data snapshots' section (above) is already inspiring - just from a glance at the way environmental impacts are displayed across North America.

They also link out to a 'climate stripes' tool, which shows bar-code-esque images representing each state's yearly temperature and precipitation from 1895–2020. Red bars for warm years, and blue for cool ones; green for wet years, and brown for dry ones.

2. Visme

Visme specialises in visualisations of messages that might otherwise be a little complicated to communicate, and they helpfully have a whole page of visualisations of climate change data. Even the way this graph is displayed is inspiring some powerful representations of the impact of energy consumption.

3. Visual Capitalist

Search for any topic or sub-topic of climate change on this site, and they'll surely have a heap of infographics, charts and numbers represented in a more engaging way than a spreadsheet. No offence to spreadsheets.

Even the different graph formats show some different ways in which you could present data or information in an artistic way. By using waves, dots, lines, splashes, or really anything ya damn like. It's your project, after all.

Arts Help really do want to pay you to create an art project that addresses climate change, and we really want you to get that money, honey.

You can submit as many proposals as you like, so why not go for it. You've got nothing to lose by submitting a proposal.