Working with the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), we created the Climate Equity Dashboard, a format for comparing the inequalities between generations and regions caused by climate change. The dashboard was published in a column on the NIES website on October 30, 2025.

Background

In climate change, the countries and generations that have emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases are not the same as those that suffer most of the damage. There are already many data sets and charts that show inequality from a particular angle, such as crop yields or economic losses. Each of them, however, is one cross-section of the problem, and it remained hard to see what should be grasped as a whole.

NIES asked us to visualize the inequalities between regions and generations related to climate change. Our goal was to create an entry point that lets non-specialists grasp the whole picture and start thinking about it.

What was made

The Climate Equity Dashboard is a circular diagram that spreads outward from the center. It organizes the chain of cause and effect that starts from human activity into four indicators, all expressed per capita so that they are easy to compare.

  • GDP (the scale of the economy)
  • Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
  • Damage costs
  • Costs of countermeasures

The four indicators are connected by arrows, and on the arrows, colored circles carry the relative values between indicators, such as GHG emissions per GDP and damage per GHG emissions. Looking only at the size of emissions makes large countries stand out, but placing the relative values side by side shows that some countries and generations emit little and still suffer large damage.

A dashboard can be made for each generation, divided into 30-year periods, and for each country, so the same form can be used to compare both generations and regions.

The NIES page also provides an explanatory video, image files, slides and a template. The figures are published under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.

How it was done

We began by discussing with the researchers what should count as inequality, and organized the points at issue. Between the accuracy that specialists value and clarity for people seeing the topic for the first time, we decided which information to keep and which to make more abstract.

The form was decided through discussion over prototypes. We tried squares, diamond shapes and a version that expressed values only by the size of circles, but the values were hard to read or the causal relationships were hard to see. In the end, we adopted a circular layout, which can show how economic activity at the center spreads to damage and countermeasure costs on the outside.

The process is described in an article on ZUKAI Inc.'s note, "Giving structure to a specialized and complex world: a diagram as an entry point to dialogue about the inequality of climate change" (in Japanese).

Overview

  • Period: published on October 30, 2025
  • ZUKAI Inc.'s role: organizing how to frame inequality, structuring the indicators, designing the dashboard, and producing the images for publication
  • Deliverables: Climate Equity Dashboard (figures, slides and a template)
  • Published in: a column of the Social Systems Division, NIES
  • Team: NIES (Tomohiro Tasaki, Takehiko Hayashi, Seiichi Ogami, Rintaro Yamaguchi), ZUKAI Inc. (Makoto Okiyama, Tetsuro Kondo, Gen Nakamori, Tatsumi Igarashi)
  • Credit: National Institute for Environmental Studies and ZUKAI Inc. (2025), Visualization of intergenerational and intragenerational inequality caused by climate change