Green screen: be on message with Climoji

Climate change is a hot topic. In two ways: the planet is heating up, and documentaries like Blue Planet II have put the environmental question front-and-centre. This week the Evening Standard launched its The Last Straw campaign to end the plastic plague in the capital: restaurants including Sexy Fish, The Wolseley, Quo Vadis and Brasserie Zedel have pledged to get rid of straws in their restaurants.

Joining the conversation is important but finding the language to express your feelings can be tricky. You want to tell your housemates to do more recycling — but firing off aggressive texts feels condescending and adding a smiley at the end looks pathetic.

Thankfully, a team of artists in New York have a suitably millennial solution to the problem: Climoji, an evocative set of climate change-themed emoji. The new keyboard means you can convey your fears about the state of the planet in the same way you’d express laughter, anger or frustration: just send your housemate a litter emoji or a symbol of a house being crushed by a bin bag. If they need further encouragement, try a miserable fish in a plastic bottle or a plastic bottle in a fish.

With these in your arsenal it’s easy to make sure people get the message. And the opportunities are endless: when your colleague buys their fifth plastic bottle of the week, send them a whale with a plastic bottle in its stomach. When your sister insists on tumble-drying her clothes, fire her a melting iceberg. If she continues, a starving polar bear or a dying penguin should do it.

The Climoji are pretty bleak — which is the point, says artist Marina Zurkow, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. She hopes the drowning arm sticking out of a whirlpool symbol will become a metaphor for despair, making us think about flooding and drowning as everyday, realistic occurrences.

There’s a racial element, too. Depicting a darker-skinned person drowning and a white person in the life raft was a deliberate move, Zurkow explains. The reality is that that white people will generally fare better in the face of climate change than those with darker skin. Unlike with the traditional emoji keyboard, there is only one skin colour option for each icon.

She calls the introduction of Climojis into the mainstream an emotional shift. Dead trees, pollution and hurricanes all serve as shorthand communication for “despair, hope and solidarity”, says Zurkow, and this new visual vocabulary will help to “encourage conversations around environmental concerns”. Desperate times call for desperate emoji.