The Peoples’ Climate Vote, a world poll you can explore
The Peoples’ Climate Vote is the biggest standalone public opinion poll on climate change, run by the United Nations Development Programme with the University of Oxford. In 2021 UNDP’s communications agency asked us to turn it into a website: somewhere anyone could see what people in their country think, set it against the rest of the world, and share it. We designed it, built it and took it to the edge of launch before the programme changed direction. In 2026 we went back to it with the 2021 results and built the site we always wanted to ship: an interactive world map, a data centre and three looks from one codebase.
Overview
The brief set four objectives. Make the results readily accessible on an ongoing basis. Educate the public about climate action. Explain what the vote is. Give supporters something worth sharing. And it had to work simply on a phone and load in places with weak wifi.
Behind those sat a hard problem. The 2021 vote had asked 1.2 million people in 50 countries about a climate emergency and eighteen policies, cut by age, gender and education. Until then the way to publish it had been a report. The website was meant to replace the report, so the data had to be explorable without ever feeling like a spreadsheet.
The art of protest
Working with the UNDP, we showed three directions and the team chose the one we called the art of protest: black, yellow and teal, torn paper edges, a heavy display face and duotone photographs of real people, because the vote is a protest in numbers rather than a publication. Regions became tall colour columns that open on hover, the part of the first design the client picked out.
Every result was designed to be saved as an image or shared straight to social, so a finding could travel further than the site.
The data and the build
Most of the effort went where it usually goes on a data project: into the data. Survey files arrived with inconsistent names and missing answers, so we wrote the mapping that cleaned them and a data centre that let researchers download the tables underneath every chart. The homepage carried what we called one click wonders: pick a region, an age group or a question and land on a result you can save.
What it became
The first version was a React front end on a Node API and a database, built for a launch during COP27 in November 2022. We built the site as a working prototype on the 2021 results, with no server at all, so it runs from any host and loads on a weak connection, which was the hardest line in the original brief.
Peoples’ Climate Vote
Empowering shareable data
As we continued to embrace the vast quantities of global survey data from the Oxford and UNDP team survey we also set about to make the site a shareable asset; we use the data to create image snaps for users to create cards drawn in the browser, saved as an image and ready to post online.
We were asked to turn the Peoples’ Climate Vote into a website where anyone could see what people in their country think about climate change, and share it. We designed it and built it, and I’m very proud that we went back to it and made the site we always wanted to ship.
