Helping the Copernicus Climate Change Service capture a year of conditions in Europe

Sarah LeachSarah Leach
  14 June 2021

How unusual do you think last year’s weather was? And how does this relate to climate change? The Copernicus Climate Change Service’s recently released European State of the Climate 2020 can help give you the answers! For the fourth year in a row, EJR-Quartz worked within a large team of collaborators to create the report and an accompanying publicity campaign.

The European State of the Climate’s focus is providing a snapshot of conditions in Europe for one year, alongside longer-term data. This allows readers to understand how day-to-day weather events fit into a changing climate across the continent and around the rest of the world. The report covers a range of variables and events; some familiar, like average temperatures, heatwaves and storms, as well as some that might seem less obvious, like sunshine duration, soil moisture, river flow and lake surface temperatures.

EJR-Quartz’s role in the project was to ensure that the entire report had a consistent, accessible voice and visual presentation – no small task for a report tens of thousands of words long, written by dozens of people from institutions across Europe. We also created a social media campaign that attracted attention from hundreds of thousands of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram users, and managed the creation of animations and visuals with our own Science Office and external partners.

Coordinating all of this just up our street, requiring attention to detail, working in highly collaborative diverse teams, and a thorough understanding of both the scientific content and the communications best practices to ensure it was accessible to a non-specialist audience.

The report can be found on the Copernicus Climate Change Service website, where you can explore it online, read a focused summary with the main takeaways or watch a video overview.