Demystifying Environmental and Sustainability Data for Effective Communication in the 21st Century

Data is not just numbers. It is critical for research communication, advocacy and decision-making. Data and the maps on climate change, air pollution, water, agriculture, urbanisation and economy, when put together, paint a larger picture of the situation in terms of sustainability and development.

So, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), one of South Asia’s leading think tanks on the politics of development, environment and climate change, invites you to join its Global Online Certificate Training, which focuses specifically on: understanding data, analyzing it, and visualising it to tell climate change and development stories to different stakeholders for action.

With only seven years to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals, climate change poses an existential threat to these goals and humanity as a whole. So the course will focus on use of data related to climate change, extreme weather events and sustainability. It will briefly cover outcomes of the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) too, held from 30 November to 12 December, 2023 at Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to analyse and unravel what the numbers really say on environment and development. They will be able to create visually impactful stories, maps and dashboards using state-of-the-art visualisation tools for interactive communication and collaterals, for different stakeholders to trigger actions—at regional and global level.

What will you learn?

• Data Sourcing: Learn how and where to research for relevant data on environment and sustainability. You will learn to find different data sets, clean, transform and make them ready for analysis using Excel and Microsoft PowerBI.
• Data Analysis and Modelling to make data meaningful: Learn skills required to process data and create relationships between different data sets on environment and development (includes SDGs).
• Data Visualisation: Understand the basic concepts of visualisation and learn to visualise data using Data wrapper, and Microsoft PowerBI.
• Data Dashboard: Learn to create interactive dashboards showing relationships between different data sets on the environment and development.
• Report Writing: Develop skills to process, visualise, and integrate environmental data into simple, compelling and informative ‘reports, articles and stories’ for print and web.

Who can attend?

• Professionals, government officials and policymakers
• Academia: Faculty and researchers, and students associated with climate and sustainable development
• Researchers and writers on environment and development
• National and international civil society groups, NGOs, climate activists and advocates
• Industries: Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)/CSR officers, Public relations/Communication officers
• Data managers and statisticians interested in improving communication skills
• Anyone else interested in the subject

Course structure

The self-paced online programme will have video lectures, presentations, tutorials, quizzes and assignments. Participants will also get an opportunity to work on an in-depth project of their choice.

The programme will also have three live interactive sessions for meeting the trainers and fellow participants. 

The programme has been designed in such a way that it can be completed along with a regular job or study. 

The course is broken down into four modules

• Module 1: Introduction to state of environment, the sustainable development goals (SDGs), trends and significance of data for effective communication and informed decision making
• Module 2: Finding the right data on environment and development for in-depth research
• Module 3: Data processing and analysis to make data meaningful
• Module 4: Creating interactive data visualizations, maps and dashboards 

Key requirements

All participants would require:

• A computer/laptop
• A high-speed internet connection

COURSE DIRECTOR

Kiran Pandey
Programme director
Information Management, CSE
Email: kiran@cseindia.org
Phone: +91-9871215338 

COURSE COORDINATOR

Susan Chacko
Senior Manager
Information Management, CSE
Email: susan@cseindia.org
Phone: +91-9958387577