Re-Framing Data Narratives for Forest and Climate Futures: A Critical, Collaborative Approach to Data Activism

As part of the project Forest Carbon Futures, I present reflections from a community-based initiative to co-design public resources for data understanding, engagement, and advocacy at the intersection of forest and climate research and policy. This work leverages critical, creative approaches, strategies and insights from visual communication design, narrative visualisation, and related practices to express complex forest carbon data in ways that preserve ecological specificity while supporting meaningful connections between diverse publics, data representations, more-than-human communities, and real-world implications and possibilities. Through a lens of storytelling and ecological situatedness, we seek to re-frame extractive narratives that homogenise and decontextualise the forest, and foster visual sense-making practices that convey a visceral sense of place alongside the complex, mycelial role of forest carbon in our lives. Here I discuss initial insights from our co-design process in order to inform future work surrounding ecological and climate data literacies, focusing particularly on avenues for invoking ecological place and narrative in fostering community-organising, policy-making, and advocacy.