In preparation for the COP26 climate summit, the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) wanted to launch a campaign to encourage climate action. As part of this campaign, they needed to build a digital eco-system that could help people of all ages from all countries understand why this action is so necessary.

Across the world, we all have excuses for why we aren’t doing more to stop climate change. These excuses are the biggest threat to humanity. Like asteroids, they could destroy our only home.

To propel people from apathy to action, we created World of Excuses, an interactive online experience that visualised the world’s most common excuses as asteroids hurtling towards Earth.

Each user’s excuse was destroyed with plain and simple facts, before they were given a tool to help them continue the conversation about climate action. Including an Instagram filter that forced people to face the alarming facts of climate change, and a Chrome Plugin called Thesaurus Rex - designed to uncomplicate the science of extinction by translating tricky terms.

There’s no single silver bullet argument that appeals to the 7 billion strong audience this campaign needed to appeal to - let alone the excuses that their friends and family may have. As a result, this campaign held a mirror up to our audience, using data to determine the most common excuses and then allowing the audience to see themselves reflected in one.

By being grounded in this individual relevance for each user, this would enable us to speak to them with the context of how they personally understood the issue of climate change. Rather than appealing to them with a fact or piece of evidence that they would be indifferent to.

Climate change can be complicated for many to understand, accordingly, the World of Excuses user experience was designed to make this information as easy to digest as possible.

Several design elements were used to make the website feel less like reading a white paper from a climate scientist. Hand-written call-outs, underlines and shapes made information feel more accessible but also highlighted the most important facts.

To stimulate more emotion from the user, photo-real asteroids helped make the experience feel for immediate and daunting, with Earth always the target of each. To make this element of the experience feel more real for users, the Earth rotation was matched to the time in their location – so if it was dark, they saw their town or city in darkness.

The coverage of the UNDP’s overall campaign was unprecedented. It was featured in news stories across 98 countries, and the World of Excuses received over 3,000 earned media mentions. From the Indian Express, to Yahoo News, to CNN.

Traffic to the World of Excuses digital ecosystem has reached almost 1 million website visits and counting – as it remains a continued resource for people to understand the simple facts of climate change.