vis4climate Workshop 2026

The need to understand, mitigate, and adapt to climate change and its resulting problems is greater than ever. Solutions can take many forms, ranging from understanding key factors in climate modeling to monitoring forests and species distributions to deciding how to model a sustainable energy or transportation grid, and finally, to communicating the implications to non-experts. This 4th IEEE VIS workshop on visualization and climate change aims to continue the discussion of the role visualization can play in mitigating climate change and to build a strong community of academics and practitioners. In contrast to the interdisciplinary role of visualization in other domains, climate change problems include numerous and diverse stakeholders, and therefore calls for transdisciplinary collaborations among these stakeholders. This workshop aims to elevate the role of visualization in combating climate change by creating a space for interactive discussions with invited guests and the scientific community. To this end, the workshop invites a diverse set of guests from policy, community engagement, and science. For more information, see the Workshop Proposal.

Goals of this Workshop

Program

Talks, discussions, and networking. We will have invited speakers from academia, policy, and community engagement, as well as presentations of accepted submissions. We will also have ample time for discussions and networking to foster collaborations and build a strong vis4climate community. The main workshop will be held in Boston, but we will have a satellite workshop in Paris that cross streams presenters. The workshop will happen on Monday, November 9, 2026 8:00 AM - 11:30 PM (EST). See the Week at a Glance program for more details.

Invited Guests

Time (EST)	Program
08:00 - 08:05	Welcome from the Organizers
08:05 - 08:45	Paper Session 1: Communication & Education Toward Climate Dataviz Literacy: An Initial Educational Agenda for the vis4climate Community Cassia Fernandez Klimadashboard: Tangible Climate Data Communication Across Austria and Germany Christina Humer Visualizing and "Budgeting" the Emissions of Everyday GenAI Use Yuheng Ren Quiet Climate Communication: Beauty and Poetry Francesca Samsel Beyond Visual Design - Rethinking Persuasive Data Storytelling to Address Wicked Problems Zoe Eather Paper Session 2: Domain Experts GNN-VIEW: Visual Inspection and Explanation of GNN-based Weather Models Alessandro Lucatelli Enabling a Material Re-Use Workflow with LLM-Extracted Metadata for Circular Construction Peter Waldert AgroScan - An Interactive SOC Prediction Tool for Farmers Clara Buller GeoXplain: On-the-Fly Visual Explanations for Weather Foundation Models Clemens Walter Koprolin
08:45 - 09:30	Panel Discussion with our Special Guests Ana Paola De La Vega (City of Boston), Lucy Padilla (Climate Partner), Yuri Engelhardt (University of Twente), Valérie Masson-Delmotte (Université Paris Saclay), Dietmar Offenhuber (Northeastern University)
09:30 - 10:00	Coffee Break
10:00 - 11:00	Interactive Group Discussions Discuss with our special guests questions like "How to effectively collaborate across disciplinary boundaries to tackle climate problems?", "How to drive the impact of visualization tools for public discourse, education, and decision-making?", and "How to empower diverse stakeholders to understand climate data and make informed decisions?".
11:00 - 11:30	Convergent Discussions and Conclusion Share the insights from the discussions and formulate key takeaways.

Ana Paola De La Vega

City of Boston

Ana Paola De La Vega is an environmental policy and planning specialist with over five years of experience advancing climate policy and sustainable development through data-driven analysis and decision-making. Her work spans international cooperation in Mexico, municipal and state governments in the United States, and applied research on the interactions between climate, health and the built environment in Peru. She specializes in monitoring and evaluation frameworks, spatial and quantitative analysis, and data visualization, translating complex data into actionable policy insights.
She currently serves as a Senior Analyst at the Environment Department for the City of Boston, where she led the development of the metrics framework and interactive dashboard for the City’s 2030 Climate Action Plan and supports climate planning, reporting and policy implementation through evidence-based tools and analytics.

Lucy Padilla

Climate Partner

Lucy Padilla is a Sustainability and Climate Change Consultant at ClimatePartner, where she supports organizations in measuring, managing, and reducing their environmental impacts. With five years of experience in corporate sustainability, she specializes in greenhouse gas accounting, product carbon footprints, life cycle assessments, science-based targets, and decarbonization strategies. Lucy has worked with companies across diverse sectors, helping them navigate sustainability reporting requirements and develop data-driven climate action plans. Originally from Mexico, Lucy holds a Bachelor's degree in Sustainable Development Engineering from Tecnológico de Monterrey and a Master's degree in Sustainable Management and Eco-Innovation from Rennes School of Business. She is passionate about translating complex sustainability concepts into practical solutions that drive meaningful environmental progress and business value.

Yuri Engelhardt

University of Twente

Yuri Engelhardt works at the UT Climate Centre of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Yuri is the author of The Language of Graphics (2002) and has contributed to various other books, initiatives, and publications. In the forthcoming book Elements of Diagramming, Clive Richards and Yuri explore the diversity of The Languages of Visualisation, their relationships, and the basic conceptual building blocks of these visual languages. Regarding the urgent transitions that are required in the face of the climate crisis, Yuri is concerned that climate science alone is not enough to create the necessary momentum. He believes that we can boost awareness and climate action by using insights from psychology, and by communicating about the climate emergency with compelling visualisations. He is co-organiser of the Visualising Climate conference.

Valérie Masson-Delmotte

Université Paris Saclay

Valérie Masson-Delmotte is a CEA scientist working in the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (LSCE) of Université Paris Saclay, and co-responsible for the Climate Society Center. From 2015 to 2023, Valérie was co-chair of the IPCC working group on the physical science basis of climate change, and has co-supervised several reports assessing the state of knowledge related to climate change. Since 2018, she is a member of the national climate change committee (Haut conseil pour le climat), with the mandate to evaluate public policies related to greenhouse gas emission reductions and climate change adaptation, and develop recommendations. Valérie is strongly involved in outreach related to climate change knowledge and published multiple books for the general public. She was awarded numerous prices for her research and an honorary doctorate by the Utrecht University for her work on climate science.

Dietmar Offenhuber

Northeastern University

Dietmar Offenhuber is a Professor and Chair of the department of Art + Design at Northeastern University, with a secondary appointment in the school of Public Policy. He worked as Key Researcher at the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the Ars Electronica Futurelab and as a professor in the Interface Culture program of the Art University Linz, Austria. Dietmar’s current research focuses on environmental information and evidence construction as a socio-material design process. His current book is Autographic Design: the Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World (MIT Press). He also wrote the award-winning monograph Waste is Information – Infrastructure Legibility and Governance (MIT Press), worked as an advisor to the United Nations, and published books on digital public space, accountability technologies and urban informatics. In his artistic practice, he often collaborates with composers. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has won awards across numerous venues.

Important Dates

All deadlines are at 11:59pm (23:59) Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

Submission deadline: ~~June 25, 2026~~ June 30, 2026
Author notifications: July 23, 2026
Camera-ready deadline: August 13, 2026

Call for Participation

Submissions can be made on PCS (select VGTC > VIS 2026 > VIS 2026 vis4climate). All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least 2 reviewers, including invited external reviewers and members of the workshop committee. We want to give authors the option to decide whether they would like their accepted submissions archived. Submissions will serve as guiding topics for discussions during the workshop. Therefore, please indicate which domain area, visualization task, and target audience your submission addresses.