Race towards 2020

Ideas
(1) Visualising progress towards the EU's three 2020 Energy Targets in a single, simple view.

(2) Presenting efficiency and renewables as means, and reduction of CO2e as target

(3) The mitigation process has been described as a “Race to the Bottom”. We turn the race-picture into something "positive".

Picture
Please see Sketch

(1) The distance between the runners and the finish line represents how much a country still has to go before reaching its CO2e-target. --> This visualises the stock of mitigation.

(2) Countries with recent quantified mitigation initiatives are flagged. Moving the cursor over the flags shows the last three implemented", "adopted" and "planned" major initiatives. --> This visualises the flow of mitigation.

Data
(1) CO2e-data: Eurostat's series displays two-years lag and only annual data. Monthly data with two month lag seems, however, available. We would either ask them or ask PIK/4CMR. Note: It would also work with the data we have now, just less moves in the race.

(2) Data on targets: EU Effort-Sharing Decision

(3) Policy-data (Exciting!): EEA's Policies & Measures Database, which quantifies reductions and provides options to ensure relevance

User Engagement
Vote on favourite mitigation action by clicking on their "runner of the month"?

Calculation
In the EU Effort-Sharing Agreement most countries have to reduce emissions relative to their 2005-benchmark but the poorer ones instead need to hold down the growth of their emissions to stay below beyond a proportion of 2005. This creates a problem for visualising progress in one dimension. I suggest to interpolate targets for the second group by assuming that they must reach their target linearly. Then the progress of both groups can be described along the same axis.The distance to target is the difference of real emissions to the linearly interpolated target the country would have would it want to reach its official 2020 target linearly.

Length of Line = %target - (2005level-Currentlevel)/2005level