three countries are live · click one to open its signals
About
It started with how much I didn't know.
I've been to a lot of climate events. Sat through a lot of talks, watched a lot of pitches. And the thing that struck me most wasn't the solutions — it was how often somebody stood up and described a problem I had never heard of.
Not obscure problems either. Real ones, affecting real people, sometimes millions of them. I just had no idea they existed.
That kept happening. And eventually it raised an obvious question: if I'm sitting in the room where these things get discussed, and I'm still hearing about them for the first time — what about everyone who isn't in the room?
Those problems were never hidden. They just didn't live anywhere you could go and look.
So I wondered whether there could be a place where they were all shown — no matter how big or how small.
Not just the headline crises. Not just the ones large enough to make the news. A drainage ditch that floods four times a year and a delta with seven million people on it, on the same map, both treated as real.
Because the scale of a problem doesn't tell you whether it's worth solving. It tells you how likely you were to have heard about it.
What it is now
Planet Pulse is a map of environmental problems. You pick a country and get specific, located, individually sourced signals — not global averages. Punjab pumping 156% of the groundwater that refills each year. Coral cover down 78% across ten Abu Dhabi reefs in a decade. A Norfolk village losing about two metres of coastline a year, with no compensation for anyone whose house goes into the sea.
Every problem comes with an interactive simulation of how it actually works, because a number tells you a fact and a simulation lets you find it out yourself.
And where a source is weak, the site says so on the card. A platform about making problems visible shouldn't hide its own uncertainty.
Where it honestly is
Not finished, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
Three countries. Thirty-six signals, each with its own simulation. An early version that's been in front of real students. A long list of things still in progress — the biggest being the part I haven't built yet: letting people add the problem outside their own door, so the map fills up with the things nobody has written down.
That was the whole point of the original question. It's the part still ahead of me.
About the information
Every figure comes from an official source — a government body, a UN or intergovernmental organisation, or peer-reviewed research — and is the latest published as of September 2026. Most describe 2025 or earlier, the latest complete years; anything dated 2026 is a recent release and may be provisional or later revised. The simulations are explanatory models, not forecasts, and values they calculate are marked illustrative. Planet Pulse is an educational project: it is not official advice, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the organisations it cites. Always check the linked source before relying on a number.
Changelog
now
A page for every problem, official sources only — choosing a problem now opens it full screen, with the facts, timeline, sources and simulation laid out to read, and previous / next to move between them. Every source was checked again and replaced where needed with government, UN or peer-reviewed ones: news sites, blogs, campaign groups and Wikipedia are gone. That changed some numbers — India’s coal share is 68% on Ministry of Power figures, UK 2025 wildfires reached 54,050 ha (EFFIS), Abu Dhabi counts 3,500+ dugongs.
v2.1
Fact-checked and polished — every simulation re-checked against its sources. Delhi now uses official CPCB figures (2025 was its cleanest year since 2018, yet still about 19× the WHO limit); Punjab is 111 of 153 blocks; Bengaluru's 6,900 are government borewells; UK nature decline runs to 2021; Happisburgh shows no legal right to compensation rather than £0; the roadside chart now separates NO₂ from PM2.5; brine from thermal plants floats rather than sinks; and more. Cars now face the way they drive, and the scenes have more life in them.
v2
Everything rebuilt, deeper — twelve signals per country instead of five, each sourced; a country overview with emissions, electricity and warming; a timeline on every signal; tap-to-define glossary terms; search across all 36; links that open straight to a signal or simulation; a proper phone layout; and every simulation redrawn from scratch. Correction: the Gulf’s grey mangrove breathes through pencil-like roots that poke up from the mud, not arching prop roots — the UAE mangrove simulation now shows them properly.
before
India added · three countries live — delhi's winter inversion, Punjab groundwater, heat mortality, the Yamuna and the Sundarbans — five more signals and five more simulations.
before
Mangroves rebuilt from a photograph — they had been drawn standing on dry sand. Mangroves are intertidal — the waterline now runs through the belt and the roots sit in the tide, which is the whole reason a mangrove belt works as a sea defence.
before
Simulations rebuilt in 2D — the first version was 3D and read as approximate. Redrawn as cross-sections with measured rulers, source links and ghost outlines showing what used to be there.
before
United Arab Emirates added — groundwater at twenty times its recharge, coral collapse, wet-bulb heat, the 2024 floods, the mangrove belt.
before
Interactive simulations — every signal gained a working model of its mechanism, so the relationship can be found rather than stated.
before
One country, done properly — narrowed from a thin global map to the United Kingdom alone — five problems, each traced to a primary source, with weak sources flagged in the interface.
start
The question behind it — after enough climate events, enough problems heard about for the first time: where do you go to see the ones nobody has written down?
Next
Community reporting — letting anyone add the problem outside their own door. It needs a backend and moderation to be real, so it is not in this build. It is the part the whole idea was pointing at.