ESA Climate Change Competition: Forests in a Changing Climate
As the world is turning its attention to Bélém for COP 30, hosted in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) team is launching a competition to harness the power of satellite-derived data to visualise forests’ role and vulnerability in climate change.
Your mission: transform cutting-edge Earth observation data into powerful visuals revealing the two-way link between climate change and forest loss—from shifting forest biomass and CO₂ emissions from deforestation to forests’ vulnerability to extreme weather events. Can you turn this science into a visual wake-up call?
Impress the judges and your work could take centre stage across ESA’s social media channels, earn you exclusive ESA branded prizes, and for the overall winner a behind the scenes tour of ESA’s state of the art Earth Observation Multimedia Centre in Italy.
Captured on 22 May 2025, the first image from the Biomass mission reveals a stunning view of the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil.
How?
Bring the ESA-CCI ECVs (Essential Climate Variables) data to life with stunning visualisations and demonstrate your creativity in one of three competition categories:
- Static image: An infographic with a clear and impactful message
- Animation: A timelapse or GIF illustrating changes over time
- Interactive: A scrollable story or dashboard allowing user engagement
The Challenge
Forests are essential for Earth’s climate, as they serve as a major sink of CO₂, and thus influence local and regional climate through carbon storage. They affect Earth’s surface energy balance and the water cycle. They are also an essential shelter to 80% of all terrestrial species. But with rising global temperature, ecosystem services provided by forests, such as climate regulation, carbon sequestration, and habitat provision are under threat. While the burning of fossil fuel is estimated to account for around 90% of the additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at present, deforestation accounts for most of the rest, showing how human activities amplify forests’ roles in climate change.
Here are some of the many angles you could explore with your climate data visualisation:
- Biomass changes over time: Show how forest carbon stocks have changed over the past decade in critical hotspots such as the Amazon, Southeast Asia or Congo.
- Impacts of deforestation on emissions: Visualise CO₂ emissions resulting from forest loss in tropical regions, and their connection to land-use change.
- Visualise how extreme weather events, which are increasing and becoming more frequent under climate change, are affecting forests.
- Investigate connection of biomass change to changes in other parameters, such as changes in clouds and explore the implications for climate feedback loops.
Biomass in the Amazon North of Bolivia, 2010-2020
Submission Requirements and Guidlines
Each submission must include:
- The visualisation output (either in static, animated, or interactive formats)
- A user-friendly Jupyter Notebook (or, alternatively, a read-me file in Markdown or Text format), clearly demonstrating how the visualisation was produced and which ESA-CCI data and any auxiliary data were used. A template of the Notebook will be shared during the introductory session for suggestions on how to structure this.
- Include any relevant information needed to run the notebooks material (for example environment file for additional libraries required, link to a generated website/platform)
All files must be combined into a single compressed folder (.zip or .rar) named: ‘{CONTESTANTLASTNAME} _{ENTRYCATEGORY}_submission{#number}.zip’
When?
Registration for the competition is open now
Online Introductory Session 24th September 16:30-18:30 CEST
The session will cover competition guidelines, introduce the Training Environment and CCI Toolbox, and provide a tutorial on accessing and visualising CCI data using example notebooks. Participants will also receive guidance on effective climate science communication and how to register for the dedicated JupyterLab environment to develop their visualisations and code.
Project Development Period - following training session
Date – Final Submission Deadline for your visualisation 30th September midnight (CET)
Judging Panel
Our judging panel will include data visualisation specialists, Earth Observation experts, and science communicators from across the ESA member countries
Register here: (The competition is open to Nationals of ESA member states only)
About ESA-CCI
ESA’s Climate Change Initiative exploits the full satellite archive to generate long-term climate data series for 30 key aspects of the climate, known as Essential Climate Variables (ECVs), with some records now spanning over five decades. This wealth of scientific data is invaluable not only for understanding how our planet is evolving but also for illustrating the causes and impacts of climate change at global and regional scales.
ECVs are physical, chemical, or biological variables or a group of linked variables that critically contribute to assessing changes across key components of the Earth’s climate system, including the cryosphere, oceans, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and anthroposphere. To create an ECV, individual satellite sensors are pieced together to create one long term robust data record. With the help of this data we are able to understand how the climate is changing.
These datasets are freely available and in open-access on ESA CCI’s data portal.
Find out more about ESA-CCI ECVs here.
Terms & Conditions and Competition Rules
You can find the full Competition Rules and T&Cs using the buttons below.
