The Crunch: heatwaves, air pollution and other top charts from 2023 - The Guardian

The Crunch: heatwaves, air pollution and other top charts from 2023 | | The Guardian

Welcome to the third edition of The Crunch and we hope you’re enjoying the holidays!

We’re going to do things a little differently in this week’s newsletter – we’ve picked a few data visualisations from 2023 that we couldn’t stop thinking about. We’ve got a visual essay about loneliness, the history of immigration to Australia, air pollution around the world, refugees in Gaza, a record-setting year of heat and an explainer on password breaches.

Five great charts from 2023

1. Loneliness: 24 hours in an invisible epidemic

Alvin Chang’s visual essay about loneliness using data from the American time use survey was one of our favourite pieces of data visualisation this year and it made some other end-of-year lists too.

One of the things it does extremely well is to humanise the data by representing survey participants as animated gifs that change depending on the activity they’re undertaking. Reminding readers that there are real people behind statistics is one of the great challenges when visualising this type of data and Chang’s format not only does this well, but presents it in an engaging visual way reminiscent of looking into a block of apartments at night – a neat visual metaphor for the insight we get into these people’s lives.

2. How migration changed Australia

This streamgraph about Australia’s immigration history was one of the Guardian Australia data team’s favourite pieces we produced this year.

Migration has played a huge role in Australian history – about half the people in the country are first- or second-generation migrants. Historical policies and events such as wars, pandemics and financial crises have all played a role both in who makes Australia home and how many people arrive. You can explore the last 100-plus years of Australian immigration in the interactive timeline.

3. Toxic air

In 2023, the Guardian’s US, UK and Australian visual and data teams all produced work examining how air pollution affects people.

About 98% of Europeans are breathing highly damaging polluted air, according to an investigation by our colleagues in the UK. While Australia has relatively low levels of air pollution, comparable data does show unsafe levels in many parts of the country. This disproportionately affects those in more disadvantaged areas.

It was a similar story in the US, where the neighbourhoods burdened by the worst pollution are overwhelmingly the places where Black and Hispanic populations live.

4. Fire and smoke
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This amazing (and terrifying) animation of the record-breaking wildfires and smoke in Canada by Peter Atwood is one of the best pieces of data visualisation we’ve seen in 2023. Showing the smoke and hotspot data in this way emphasises the huge scale of the fires.

Elsewhere, the team at Axios produced this animation using similar data and made the link to the fires’ impact on air quality.

In northern Australia huge bushfires burned a significant amount of land, with the collective area burned larger than many countries, including Spain.

5. Displacement in Gaza

We have previously featured maps and other data analysis showing the extent of destruction in Gaza from Israeli airstrikes and bulldozers. But this recent illustration(which we have had to crop) by our colleague Mona Chalabi really drove home the scale of the recent and historical displacement of Palestinians.

Spotlight on … a very hot year

Heat records tumbled throughout 2023 across the globe:
The New York Times
tracked global heat
The Financial Times covered the
“hottest ever September”
The world’s oceans also recorded
some of the highest temperatures ever– Elena Shao explained what this means in the New York Times
Antarctic sea ice coverage fell to the smallest extent since satellite records began in the 1970s.
The Economist explored why and what that means
Bloomberg had a great
visual explainer on how climate change is driving warming year-round
We covered a
record-breaking heatwave in eastern Australia and the lack of snow at Australian ski resorts

Off the charts

There has been a series of data breaches at large companies and online services in the past couple of years. But how much of your information is out there and how useful is it? Julian Fell and the Storylab team at the ABC put together this great interactive to show how information can be pieced together to create “portraits” of our identities.

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