Forest Growth in the last 30 years
Which countries are regrowing their forests at the highest rates?
We often hear the negative side of climate stories, so for this project, I decided to look for some positive insights. I was curious about reforestation efforts worldwide. I started by looking at trends around net growth in forests but found that the visual I had in mind would be dwarfed by China's sheer acreage of forest growth.
Then I found this dataset by Our World in Data on the forest area change for countries over time as a share of that country’s forest area. This made it much easier to compare the rate of growth year over year as the range was limited to a few percentage points. I then wrangled the data a bit in R to extract the top 20 countries with the highest average growth over the past three decades.
I wanted to go literal in my use of symbols for the data marks - the final visual uses “trees” to show the % growth in a country’s forest area year over year. By bundling the trees together for the 4 measured time periods (1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015), each country gets a little “forest” representing its growth over the past 3 decades.
Sketches: Bottom right is final idea before I jumped into digitizing the visual.
With that concept in mind, I put together the bones of the graphic using Data Illustrator which was a great way to build out the tree shapes accurately - I was able to link the yearly rate of change with the shape’s area.
I then brought the exported .svg into Adobe Illustrator for the final layout. I used a trick shared by Valentina D’Efelippo in her Domestika course, and used the SVG to create a brush. This made it simple to arrange the shape onto a circle for the formatting.
And voila! In the future, I’d love to dive into some of the nuances around forest loss and growth. Especially the concept of “imported and exported” deforestation: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/net-deforestation-in-trade .
Another iteration on the design, with a vertical format and updated storytelling.
