Documents of Legislation (with Abbi Fletcher)
Group Project / Group members: Yesim, Greta, Nikunj
Paris Agreement
As a group, we closely studied the Paris Agreement, a crucial global pact aimed at tackling climate change. This agreement, agreed upon by 196 countries during the UN Climate Change Conference in 2015, is a significant step towards addressing this pressing issue.
To understand it better, we analyzed the document by counting important words related to climate change.
This showed us that the agreement focuses more on what individual countries should do rather than global efforts.
THE ONLY 3 AIMS IN THE AGREEMENT & their REALIsATIONS
1st Aim
- Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change;
REALISATION of the 1st Aim
2nd Aim
2. Increasing the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions development, in a manner that does not threaten food production.
REALISATION of the 2ND Aim
3rd Aim
Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low
greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development
REALISATION of the 3RD Aim
What we found?
How does the document claim positions through language and form?
- Unspecified global goals and individual measurements for each country
- Abstract aspirations of reducing planetary temperature
- The structure of the agreement has pledge and review mechanism allows nations to set their own Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC’s) so there is no set of global commitment targets that has legal binding.
How does this language and form impact how it is engaged with, circulated, (mis)trusted or understood?
- Does not bind its parties to do anything other than report on their progress.
- There is no sufficient understanding to translate human action into quantifiable temperature reduction.
- While monitoring carbon emissions is mandated, there’s a lack of enforceability, influencing the agreement’s engagement.
At this point we thought it was a shame for this kind of important agreement to have abstract aspirations and we wanted to hack the agreement with creating a zine as a group with using the Agreement’s pages as a canvas and adding design elements to give the agreement the feeling of urgency.
Publishing Zine
We divide the pages of the agreement as a group and my experiment was to delete all the sentences in one page apart from some words to create more active Climate Activist phrases.
Revealing activist phrases
Data Visualisation
I pick out some of the current data and redesign them to be more understandable for a larger audience.
Then I apply these graphs on to actual pages of the Paris Agreement. For the group project we created a folded zine at the center here is the center zine design:
For this part of the zine we wanted to use Riso Printing method with 3 colors: Med Blue, Warm Red, Yellow U
Here is the whole zine video:
Paris Agreement (Underprepared, Underfinanced)
The lack of strong enforcement in the Paris Agreement made us question its effectiveness. So, we tried different design ideas to make it feel more urgent and hold policymakers accountable. By doing this, we aimed to raise awareness and push for more action on climate change.
Additional Individual Explorations: Bathtub Index
After presenting our zine during the final group presentations, I received feedback regarding the clarity of the graphs that I made. Addressing this, I selected one of the graphs and expanded upon it to create a new concept called the ‘Bathtub Index.’ This index calculates the amount of freshwater required to produce various foods and visually represents the water consumption using the equivalent number of bathtubs.