#moby digg

Meltdown Flags by design studio Moby Digg

German design studio Moby Digg has unveiled a series of redrawn country flags as part of a “digital protest” to highlight the danger of melting glaciers around the world.

The project is in partnership with communications agency Serviceplan and environmental science specialists at METER, and uses climate data to reshape country flags.

The digital protest will be held between the 9 -19 November, the original dates of the COP26 climate change conference. The United Nations-led conference was cancelled earlier this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, but the partners are using their work to insist “the urgent topic of glacier meltdown [be brought] back to the table”.

Flags included in the project represent countries where at-risk glaciers can be found. The list includes the US, Chile, Canada, France and Greenland.

The elements of each flag have been manipulated, with the white areas reduced in accordance to historical data, current data and data projections. Less white means more of a glacier has been or is expected to be lost.

The familiar white stars and stripes on the US’ flag, for example have been augmented instead to show a series of jagged steps and significantly smaller stars. These changes are intended to show the 83.1% glacier retreat projected in the country from 1995 to 2050.

The data used in the Meltdown Flags project has been obtained from databases and projection models from METER UNESCO and NASA, among other sources.

On each redesigned flag and graphic, the key dates are 1995, 2020 and 2050. These refer to the year of the first UN Climate Change Conference; the present year; and the goal year set within the Paris Agreement to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius respectively.

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