The United Nations Organisation recently unveiled a new open source device to globally map the impact of global warming. Called Human Climate Horizons (HCH), the tool shows how different levels of global warming will affect people’s lives around the world. Available free of charge to all through an online platform, HCH summarises with an intuitive interface a huge amount of data – from the collaboration of scientists and researchers at the Climate Impact Lab – to present projections on how climate change will affect mortality, ability to make a living and energy use in the near future.

The project, with its ability to pull together all the information collected on a global scale, points to the striking discrepancy in climate vulnerability around the world, with the poorest nations set to suffer the most. For example, the tool shows that in the UK – as in many other countries with colder climates, which tend to be richer and more polluting – the impact of climate-related mortality and energy consumption are set to decrease, while the hours you can work increase as the climate rises.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has warned that this trend means that without urgent action, climate change will lead to a significant increase in inequalities in human development.