Climate + Emoji = ( ? ) ......

If one day

The topic of climate change is not deliberately mentioned

Maybe that day is

Today

What do you think

When you see "emoji"

This?

 Or this..

Did you ever see this..

These icons depict melting sea ice, spontaneous combustion trees, black-and-white rainbows shrouded in smog, and plastic bags floating in the wind······

The design that combines the daily environment with Emoji icons is called "climoji", and their creation aims to raise public awareness and attention to some of the most important issues of this era:

Global warming and environmental damage

"Why do some of our major communication tools avoid this problem? Why doesn't the official emoticon set even have a hurricane icon?"

Climoji Icon designer Marina Zurkow

The emergence of Climoji is a breakthrough in integrating Climate Change into our daily life. With regard to global warming and environmental damage, most cases are put forward as a discussion point in formal field cooperation. We seem to have a fixed thinking:

Climate change is grand and far from life

Polar bear standing alone on the ice floe & garbage floating everywhere on the sea

This is not the case. From the melting of glaciers to the frequent occurrence of extreme weather, climate change has affected our normal life. Hurricanes and wildfires made 2017 the worst year for natural disasters on record; At the beginning of 2021, the cold weather spread rapidly in major cities in China, and Beijing ushered in the coldest morning in nearly 54 years. Scientists say that as the world continues to warm, these extreme weather phenomena will become the new normal.

On the use of these climoji icons, zurkow said she hoped that these symbols would become an invitation to promote people to launch discussions on climate change. "There is a lot of research on how metaphor enters language. All emoticons are metaphors: lips are metaphors of love, metaphors of kissing someone. So can these visual metaphors amplify and naturalize the dialogue around climate change?" （Zurkow）

Zurkow stressed, "We plan to create a set of icons to alleviate the current climate problems, which is also a philosophical alternative to our current lifestyle. The climoji icon has a wide range of contents. It can include ecological diversity, ecological justice and environmental justice; it can also be solar energy, organic agriculture, wind turbines, reducing meat consumption and green travel. But all these climoji icons They all want to convey the idea that climate change is closely related to people, which can be mitigated and controlled. However, part of this must be a spiritual change. I think that in order to achieve this psychological change, we need to have a feeling of being moved by the seriousness of things. "

Among these climoji, designer zurkow said her favorite climoji was the whale with a plastic water bottle in its belly.

A whale with a plastic water bottle in its belly

In recent years, the news of plastic residues found in the bodies of marine animals has often been exposed. Climoji's designers hope to present this fact to us in an emoticon way, so as to better appeal to the public to pay attention to climate change and environmental protection.

When climate change has Emoji, it not only enriches our daily chat topics, but also shortens our distance from environmental protection.

Perhaps, an Emoji sent inadvertently can also make the climate change topic more "people-friendly"

Climoji official website

https://www.climoji.rg