Out of the Flames. Exploring online engagement around the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires

Project Website

Out of the Flames. Exploring online engagement around the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires

Project Website
The image depicts a digital collage in black and white and grey tones focused on the environmental crisis of the Amazon rainforest, featuring thick smoke in the background and a warning text at the center. The composition includes public figures and political leaders, protesters with signs calling for respect and forest protection, a globe in the foreground, and a jaguar on the right, creating a powerful visual message about the global impact of the Amazon fires.

Out of the Flames is a collaboration between the European Forest Institute, King's College London, and The Public Data Lab, exploring forest governance and the changing role of forests in society according to web and social media data. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL), the project explored online engagement and public narratives around the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires as a way to discover which issues have been brought up together with the event. Using social media data from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram and YouTube, the project investigated the different public narratives that circulated online and explored forms of engagement, participation and experience that emerged around this event at the peak of its international media coverage. The final output is an interactive report that collects a series of interactive visualizations together with the result of a participatory process of interpretation of social media data.

Research groups