Many climate data platforms emphasize exploration, but enabling public and policy action across diverse national contexts requires visualization systems that guide interpretation. This talk presents a case study of narrative visualization for decision-oriented understanding of air pollution impacts through the August 2025 redesign of the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI).
Developed by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), AQLI translates air pollution exposure into impacts on life expectancy across countries. First launched in 2018, the 2025 relaunch emerged from an iterative co-design process between EPIC and the Visualization for Transparency Foundation (ViT), combining user research, design workshops, and evaluation cycles.
The redesign addressed limitations of the previous platform, which relied on open-ended exploration and lacked country-level views. Evaluations revealed choice paralysis and difficulty deriving policy-relevant insights, motivating a shift toward structured storytelling and guided interpretation.
A central element of the redesigned system is adaptive country pages composed of modular narrative blocks. Using scrollytelling, visual sequences present exposure levels alongside regulatory benchmarks, projected lifespan gains under alternative policy scenarios, and comparative risk relative to other health threats. These representations support policy evaluation and resource prioritization by framing epidemiological indicators as decision-relevant evidence and have contributed to public debate in high-pollution regions.
The platform incorporates data provenance and versioned updates to enhance transparency. A central design challenge was balancing scientific precision with communicative immediacy: simplified lifespan metrics increase engagement but may obscure model assumptions. Our study derives design guidelines for narrative climate platforms to support evidence-based decision-making.