Celebrating creativity, insight, and storytelling through data.
Now in its second year, The Data Lab Community’s Data Visualisation Competition is an opportunity to come together to celebrate storytelling through data. The competition provides a platform for data visualisers of all levels to hone their skills, demonstrate their abilities, and raise their profile to a global audience of data & AI professionals, students and enthusiasts.
The Challenge 📊
This year, the competition explored one of the biggest challenges facing us today, climate change.
Climate action aimed at addressing climate change is often talked about in terms of costs, trade-offs, or distant impacts that can be hard to quantify, and are often difficult for the average person to appreciate in their daily lives. By analysing data provided by The Edinburgh Climate Change Institute’s UK Co-benefits Atlas, the challenge was to uncover and visualise the positive and often hidden benefits that climate action can bring to our health, communities, economy and environment.
Contestants were tasked with choosing one or more of the 11 co-benefits modelled in the data to create a compelling, persuasive argument that highlights the benefits of climate action to a specific audience, such as council leaders or community groups.
Global participation
We were overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of the work, with over 90 submissions from around the world, including entries from the USA, Kenya, Italy, India, Tanzania, Indonesia, England and of course, Scotland – it’s safe to say this truly was a global competition!
A massive thanks again to our judges Cara Thompson (Visualisation Consultant), Lee Bunce (Policy, Communications and Engagement Lead for the Office of the Chief Statistician), Jinrui Wang (PhD Researcher/Designer and lead designer of the Co-benefits Atlas), and Saleh Seyedzadeh (Head of Data, The Data Lab) who joined us at the final to judge the top 10 shortlisted entries (as selected by The Data Lab’s data science team).
Click here for more info on the judging criteria!
Our winners!
After presentations from an exceptional top ten, selecting just three winners was no easy task for our judging panel. Each finalist demonstrated originality, creativity, and imagination. However, after much deliberation, the following projects were selected as our top three.
Third place – The Inner Circle: Who Really Benefits from Climate Action? – Thalya Lim (London, England)
This visualisation celebrates the positive story of who stands to benefit from climate action by 2050, showing that while Great Britain sees clear net gains overall, these rewards are felt most strongly in more urban areas, illustrated through the joyful metaphor of an “Inner Circle” where communities closer to city centres experience the biggest boosts, and rural communities face unique challenges as rising travel times begin to outweigh health improvements—ultimately empowering rural residents with a clear, relatable narrative that makes their experiences visible and helps them champion fairer, more inclusive transport and planning policies.
Judges comments:
The judges really admired the visual’s beautiful, distinctive design and its clear, compelling storytelling. They especially appreciated the strong focus on rural–urban co‑benefits, the thoughtful information hierarchy, and the engaging central concept. The supplementary charts added helpful context, making the main message feel intuitive and easy to grasp.
🔗 You can view Thalya’s project here!
Second place – Breathe – Sakina Salem (Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania)
This project highlights the uplifting truth that climate action can meaningfully improve our quality of life within a single generation. Through maps and visual storytelling, the visualisation shows how cleaner air builds steadily over time, why sustained effort delivers the greatest rewards, and how everyday choices like opting for greener delivery habits can inspire broader change. Ultimately, this visualisation empowers individuals and communities to shape a healthier, more thoughtful, and more hopeful future together.
Judges comments:
The judges really loved the project’s strong, engaging storytelling and its clean, beautifully polished design. They especially appreciated how clearly the air‑quality co‑benefits were communicated, with thoughtful timelines, per‑person insights and interactive touches that encouraged exploration. The overall layout, colour palette, and visualisations were described as professional, readable, and genuinely delightful to experience.
🔗 You can view Sakina’s project here!
First place – The Urban Dividend Gap: Unmasking Inequity in Scotland’s Net Zero Transition – Juliane Kloidt (Glasgow, Scotland)
This visualisation reimagines the Net Zero narrative by uncovering the Urban Dividend Gap, transforming complex datasets into a compelling, almost detective‑style story that celebrates the opportunity for a fairer climate future. The visualisation reveals how Scotland’s biggest cities shoulder hidden transition burdens and how surprising patterns, like Glasgow’s “Housing Anomaly,” show health benefits flowing toward affluence rather than need. By making these inequities visible, the project empowers Scottish councils and policymakers with the clarity and confidence to move beyond national averages toward bold, Equity‑First climate strategies, ending with an inspiring call to action: to ensure a truly just transition, we must lighten the urban burden and meaningfully uplift the vulnerable communities currently missing out on the climate dividend.
Judges comments:
The judges really appreciated how clearly and confidently the story was told, with thoughtful annotations and a strong analytical foundation shining through. They loved the project’s equity‑focused perspective, the rich comparisons across places and metrics, and the beautifully balanced poster design with its gentle colour palette and clear structure. The “urban dividend gap” and “three steps” sections stood out as engaging touchpoints that helped make the insights memorable, purposeful and easy to follow.
🔗 You can view Juliane’s project here.
Our other finalists!
Whilst they may not have been selected as prize-winning visualisations, we were incredibly impressed by the shortlisted entries featured below. Each was chosen from a strong and diverse set of submissions to join us at the final and present to the judging panel. Whether through creative design, thoughtful analysis, or imaginative approaches to storytelling, these projects show just how effective good data visualisation can be.
A Net Zero Co-Benefits Atlas for Cardiff – Aura Frizzati & Owen Craig Evans (Cardiff, Wales)
This dashboard transforms the UK Co‑Benefits Atlas into a strategic local tool for Cardiff by reframing Net Zero as an investment that delivers £472.93 million in projected city‑wide co‑benefits, integrating the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation to assess socioeconomic equity, and revealing a significant gap in how rewards, particularly from physical activity, are distributed between affluent and deprived neighbourhoods, ultimately equipping policymakers and residents with evidence to design and understand more equitable climate actions.
🔗 You can view Aura and Owen’s project here!
The future of traffic congestion within Scotland; a UK Co-Benefit Atlas Project – Chris Butler (Edinburgh, Scotland)
This project uncovers the hidden trade‑offs of Scotland’s Net Zero transition by revealing how the shift to electric vehicles may unintentionally increase congestion, creating geographic inequalities like the “Central Belt Paradox”. By using clear travel‑time metrics tailored for residents and voters, it makes a compelling call to support reduced car use and invest in public transport and active travel to avoid a future of widespread gridlock.
🔗 You can view Chris’s project here.
Not All Climate Benefits Are Created Equal: A Spatial Analysis of Climate Policy Co-Benefits and Deprivation – Luigi Creazzo and Alex Evetts (Dunfermline, Scotland)
This academic poster presents an analysis for policymakers and researchers showing that the co‑benefits of climate action are distributed unevenly across Scottish regions (appearing strongest in urban deprived areas) and introduces a new indicator, the Relative Normalised Individual Co‑benefit (RNIC), to enable fair comparison between small areas by accounting for socio‑economic differences, with mapped results that highlight and briefly interpret the underlying inequalities in how these benefits are deployed.
🔗 You can view Luigi and Alex’s project here.
Climate Action Impacts on Jobs and the NHS – Kristof Hornyik and Judit Remenyi (Dundee, Scotland)
This visualisation shows how climate action delivers measurable co‑benefits beyond emissions reduction by using UK Co‑Benefits Atlas data combined with deprivation and employment indicators to reveal how net‑zero policies improve public health, reduce NHS demand, and expand green job opportunities across Scottish communities, highlighting both differences between high and low deprivation areas and the potential to align health equity with economic development, with the report aimed at councils, policymakers, and public‑sector leaders seeking more targeted climate strategies.
🔗 You can view Kristof and Judit’s project here!
Climate Action as Preventative Healthcare – Aishwarya Raman (Glasgow, Scotland)
This visualisation frames climate action as preventative healthcare, showing through a seven‑slide narrative and a composite Climate Health Benefit Index that although climate policies generate substantial, measurable health gains, these benefits are unevenly distributed across communities and time, with only a small number of largely urban areas capturing the greatest improvements, ultimately making the case to policymakers, local authorities, public health leaders, and sceptical audiences that climate policy is health policy and that equity requires intentional, targeted design.
🔗 You can view Aishwarya’s project here.
Scottish Climate Action Co-Benefits Conversation Guide – David Rauch (New York, USA)
This conversation guide uses a social‑justice lens to help Scottish policymakers and community advocates understand how the co‑benefits of climate action are distributed. The visualisation shoes that while most communities gain, more privileged areas often benefit more, and, together with an interactive mapping tool that provides detailed local comparisons, it supports informed dialogue about what an equitable approach to climate action should look like.
🔗 You can view David’s project here.
The Value of Climate Action: Monetised Co-Benefits for Health and Society – Gelareh Holbrook (Aberdeen, Scotland)
This visualisation transforms complex climate and health data into a clear and engaging narrative that shows how local climate actions generate interconnected social, environmental, and economic benefits. The visualisation quantifies impacts such as improved air quality, enhanced wellbeing, and reduced healthcare costs, so that local authorities, practitioners, and communities can understand, compare, and act on the tangible value of climate interventions in their own areas.
🔗 You can view Gelareh’s project here!
The Data Lab Masters Winner
A special mention to The Data Lab’s masters student Tracey Phin for winning the student category!
Why spend money on cycle routes in Aberdeen/shire – Tracey Phin (Aberdeen, Scotland)
This visualisation invites the public to see cycling infrastructure not as a costly inconvenience but as a powerful, community‑wide investment—using local Aberdeen examples, public survey data, and UK co‑benefits evidence to show how cycle routes generate real monetary value through improved health, support wider Net Zero benefits, and offer long‑term gains for everyone, ultimately helping residents recognise that building safer, connected routes is a smart, positive choice for the region’s future.
🔗 You can view Tracey’s project here!
Congratulations
A massive thank you to everyone who took part in the competition, whether you were selected for the shortlist or not. We hope that taking part gave you an opportunity to work with real-world data and develop your data visualisation skills.
We’d also like to extend a thank you to The Edinburgh Climate Change Institute for working with us on the challenge and providing the data, to our judging panel for their time and efforts in helping to make the competition a success, and to The Data Lab’s partners IBM, Wheatley Group and the Scottish Government for their continued support.