Book Title: Climate Emergency Atlas (available here)
Author/illustrator: Dan Hooke
Publisher: DK
Publication Date: October 2020
Most Suitable for: Upper Ks2
Reviewer: Anna Sterling
This book plugs a gap in children’s non-fiction. It is a nod to the illustrative information eyewitness books for which DK is well known, but in a new, up-to-date layout that balances stunning photography, and modern and dramatic graphics across double-spread pages.
The book is also superb at bringing everything and more that both adults and children will have heard, read and talked about regarding the causes, impact, and solutions to climate change.
There is an awful lot to cover in this topic yet the book manages to keep it simple: the chapters cover the science behind the Earth’s climate, the causes of climate change, the impact of climate change and the changes we can make. The contents within these chapters are sobering: whilst interrogating one of the many maps and graphics of the world and its climate zones, readers eyes can cast over numerical facts that accompany them and it is clear that the writer has not held back in conveying the stark facts for example, that in 2020 Antarctica reached 20 °C for the first time, or 25% of known species are in danger of disappearing. Fact boxes and labels provide further information for the reader to digest but this is a book that can be picked up numerous times before it’s fully absorbed.
Everything that a child, or indeed, a family needs to know is contained in this book: shrinking polar ice, bush fires, farming emissions, the impact of fashion, air travel and deforestation. Countries are also compared, not only in their contribution to climate change, but also to how they are working towards solutions, for example, Ethiopia, which is one of only a handful of countries on track to meet global targets.
The final chapter covers the constructive and positive ways that countries are combatting climate change. It also explains what can be done by the reader themselves, which leaves a sense of hope and a feeling that any one of us can also be instrumental in the change that is very much needed.
Finally, the book was made during the Coronavirus outbreak and acknowledges that it is too early to know how the pandemic will affect climate change.
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You can order Climate Emergency Atlas on Amazon or from Bookshop.
Many thanks to the publisher for sending us a review copy of this book and to our Review Panel member for reviewing it.
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