Inspiring Climate Action: Immersive Methods to Engagement

Yu Sun (Glasgow), ‘Cultivating a green culture via capturing carbon emissions in China: grassroots visual data as alternative climate knowledge infrastructure’

This project explores how the crowdsourced visual data from citizens serves as a means of “material participation” (Ryghaug et al., 2018) and opens up alternative ways to generate climate knowledge and low carbon culture in the specific socio-political and sociocultural context of China. ENGOs and public sectors have been developing green campaigns to engage ordinary citizens as alternative actors in the production of carbon knowledge, cultivating everyday low-carbon culture and driving community-centred climate action in China. The study explores how the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), an ENGO based in Beijing designs climate data initiatives to crowdsource citizen data through visual tools to open up alternative ways to generate climate knowledge and inform the public about the causes and impact of the climate crisis. This campaign mobilizes the general public to take photos of daily products such as cars, household electrical appliance, clothes and other goods and track the carbon emission of manufacturers and its associated impact on people’s everyday life through using the climate data provided by IPE’s database Bluemap.

By combining both ethnographical data, social media content and relevant documents as empirical materials, this paper analyses how the visual representation of carbon emissions and their climate impact in daily life engages the public in climate knowledge production, green lifestyle choices and thus cultivates a green civic culture. I argue that the community-orientated climate action grounded in the everyday sphere opens up opportunities for citizens to practice “lifeworld environmentalism” (Zhang et al., 2026) and “energy citizenship” (Ryghaug et al., 2018). Furthermore, the project reveals the potential of visual data as climate knowledge infrastructure and the transformative power to pressure enterprises to improve their ESG performance. Taking indigenous perspectives, it contributes to enriching the discussion on the diverse forms of digital ecologies in the global south.