Environmental, ecological and sustainable issues have been prevalent in D&AD winning work for a number of years. Now, these messages are infused with an increased sense of impatience and urgency. “Our House is on Fire,” warned Greta Thunberg in 2019 and in the UK, The Guardian newspaper announced updates to its style guide, which included swapping “climate change” for “climate emergency” – saying, “It's a crisis, not a change.”

Whether focusing on the food we eat, sustainable living, wildlife and biodiversity, excessive use of plastic, or our carbon footprint, this creative work is united by a new tone that captures a sense of urgency, even panic.

In an interview with D&AD, Holmgren explained that she was interested in an idea “where you look at humans instead of the more classical storytelling where you see ice melting and all of the disasters happening.” Those images have become normalised background noise, and this film seeks to show the absurdity and the danger of that position of ignorance, not only drawing attention to the issue but quite literally bringing it home to viewers.

In a similar vein, brands and agencies have sought to bring the topic of plastic use front of mind for the public in ways that resonate with them personally. The ubiquitous material has become a symbol of disposable culture, a move away from which has been driven both by consumer trends and global governmental policies, for example those that ban or limit the use of plastic products, such as straws and carrier bags.

WWF and Grey Malaysia’s Your Plastic Diet aimed to transform an environmental crisis into a personal one by creating the largest and fastest public action movement in WWF history. Having identified that the public consumes approximately 100,000 microplastics a year via the food we eat and the water we drink, the campaign sought to process this data by visualising it as a singular, universally understood and compelling fact: the average person eats a credit card every week. The strong public reaction to this messaging became fuel for WWF’s fight to lobby governments to sign a globally binding treaty to limit plastic production.

Join The Meltdown by Jones Knowles Ritchie for Burger King sought to reduce the brand’s plastic usage by removing plastic toys from its kids’ meals and melting them down. The campaign also called upon the public to contribute to a world with less plastic waste by encouraging them to donate unwanted plastic toys from any brand that the fast food company would recycle and repurpose into play areas for children. Work such as this is a rallying cry that seeks to galvanise customers to support reforms for sustainability, even when this means doing something as provocative as taking toys away from children.

The urgency of mass extinction and biodiversity fed directly into the design process for Hankograph by Grey Tokyo for environmental organisation WILDAID. The campaign used animation to raise awareness of the ivory trade in Japanese hanko, which are used as official signatures in Japan. They are often made with ivory but most of the public are unaware of the animal suffering that takes place to source this material. By using animation made entirely of wooden hanko this work was able to stress the importance of choosing sustainable alternatives.

Conjuring the disturbing reality of the climate crisis, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra worked with software developers and music arrangers to create an algorithm that tapped 300 years of climate data to recompose Vivaldi’s 1723 masterpiece The Four Seasons to be more in line with today’s weather conditions. For Seasons – Composed by Climate Data saw winter becoming 51 bars shorter, for example, as the classic piece warps into a jarring new arrangement with visceral impact.

As language has evolved to reposition climate change as a climate crisis, creative approaches have also responded with more urgent measures. Finding alternative and creative methods to try to make the public care have been at the heart of much of the winning work. This is achieved by making a global environmental issue a personal problem, finding stories that shock the way climate stories are unfortunately often failing to do, and centring the issue within the design practice itself.

Theme Report by Neighbourhood, commissioned and edited by D&AD for the 2020 D&AD digital Annual.