Carbon Quilt

Carbon Quilt is a prototype visualisation tool designed by Carbon Visuals Ltd to raise awareness of the impact of carbon emissions by showing the size of a carbon footprint that otherwise would be invisible. In an attempt to overcome the "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome and raise awareness of the 80 million tonnes of CO2 put into the atmosphere every year, they came up with the concept of the Carbon Quilt to show the depth of emissions that would cover the earth if all the CO2 settled at ground level. This can then be divided up into "patches" to show how much different countries or activities contribute.


As well as the "visualiser" tool that you can use to explore the carbon impact around the world, Carbon Visuals provide a number of services and have a number of other visualisations and interactive tools showing the carbon footprint of various installations or activities.

This depiction of the CO2 emitted by Stoke Newington School every year is the result of a project where pupils explored compelling ways of depicting the carbon footprint of the school. This image shows the depth of CO2 generated in a year if it were all placed in an area the size of a nearby park that everyone knows.

See their flickr photo stream for more.

This visualisation shows the annual carbon quilt produced by the UK in one year; an area significantly bigger than the UK itself. As Carbon Visuals explain "The carbon quilt is the layer of carbon dioxide made up of the whole world's emissions. In 2006, we emitted enough carbon dioxide to form a layer 31 mm deep, so the depth of the quilt over a timescale of a year is 31 mm. The emissions for a day make a layer one 365th as deep. Patches reveal particular contributions to the whole world's emissions. Their areas vary, but their depth is always the same as the whole layer - the quilt depth."


Visit the carbon quilt gallery on their website for more visualisation examples in both image and video form.


This video on YouTube is particularly striking and shows a real time animation of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2006 (957 tonnes per second) in terms of filling the space occupied by the UN Building in New York every half a second.

If you are interested in Carbon Quilt and have ideas of your own, why not visit their feedback forum, see what others are thinking and share your thoughts?