See the climate change through a game

Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning network. Its goal is to « ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity » and focuses its campaigning on worldwide issues such as climate change, deforestation, overfishing, etc. They worked on this campaign with VMLY&R, an advertisement agency from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

How can we make people aware of the climate crisis in a different way that we did before? That’s the question Greenpeace and VMLY&R asked themselves. They respond with a brilliant idea in using the famous game Grand Theft Auto (known as GTA) and creating an “altered map” which shows the change that will occur in the future on the city of Los Santos, city that is one of the most well-known in the game and which is the replica of Los Angeles. In this map you can see the shape and landscapes of the city with 3 additional degrees. So, you can encounter floods, air pollution, destruction of fauna and flora, etc. The goal is to inform and to raise awareness but also to entertain and engage.

To promote this campaign, they invited 50 of the biggest Brazilian streamers to play it and share the gameplay with their communities. They also created a webpage to give people opportunity to discover the effects of climate change on Los Santos and in the real world at large. On the website they were asked to help Greenpeace with donation and in signing a petition calling for state governors to declare a climate emergency.

Greenpeace and its agency were help by climate experts in order to reproduce as well as possible the landscape of the city with 3 degrees more. The online game with the new map of Los Santos was in access in the Grand Theft Auto game into a Kings Roleplay server, a location in the game.

This campaign was a real success.
Indeed, it resulted in more than 450 hours of climate change broadcasted by the streamers and an uncountable hour of gameplay from the players.
Petition signatures increase of more than 340% and there was furthermore an increase of 40% of the donations
To finish, we can say that the campaign will be on the mind of lot of people, and it can lead to more awareness of the climate crisis as well as people that are going to do something about it.