Has it ever happened to you, due to tiring everyday life and lack of sleep? emojis faces with dark circles all you need to illustrate the message? And the beetroot emoji? Fingerprints? Harp emoji? Ashova perhaps?
As announced, we will receive all these emojis in the coming months, and in the package we will also receive a tree without a single leaf and signs of life, only a root, a brown trunk and broken, sagging branches, he writes Climate 101.
Although the description seems rather apocalyptic, especially compared to some of the novelties above, the dying tree is unfortunately an appropriate symbol for the severity of climate change, and especially one of their manifestations - drought.
Due to the change in the distribution of precipitation, but above all in the light of the increase in temperature, trees around the world have less and less water available. As a result, they slowly die off.
Inspired by those shocking scenes, in 2022, Brian Bayaki proposed to the non-profit organization Unicode Consortium, whose responsibility is the standardization of digital communication, to include, in addition to the palm tree, cypress and deciduous tree that has lost its leaves, a tree without leaves, eroded by climate change.
"The climate is changing, the drought is more frequent, more severe...", Bayaki wrote in his application. "The tree has various mechanisms to survive the drought, including shedding its leaves, but not for long." Eventually, all the resources the tree has will be exhausted.”
And when such a "thirsty" tree is eventually attacked by insects, pests or diseases, it is unable to produce defensive chemicals. The result is the death - of parts of the tree or the whole tree, which during our lifetime, absorbing carbon dioxide, was just a comrade in the front with climate change.
By 2030, droughts could displace up to 700 million people
Since Brian Bayaki sent his application two years ago, the situation has worsened: this year alone, drought has completely "dipped" some riverbeds in the Amazon, contributed to water shortages and restrictions in Serbia, brought the mighty Mississippi River to historic lows and disrupted the transportation of goods by ships…
If we sit idly by, we have an even darker future ahead of us. Due to the risk of droughts, up to 700 million people could be forced to relocate by the end of the decade, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Dried up rivers, water supply problems, grain transportation disruptions, climate refugees, and even dust storms in unexpected places like our country - these are all outlines of an increasingly challenging life on a warmer planet that could also spill over into digital communication.
Spreading awareness of the problem can contribute to a more ambitious fight against climate change, and one of the tools is the emoji of a tree tired of constant efforts to survive the drought.
"It is necessary to have as much representation of climate change in various forms of digital communication," says Dr. Ana Vuković Vimić from the Faculty of Agriculture in Belgrade, "because this is the only way for information to reach a larger number of people, especially of different ages."
Vuković Vimić - who in her scientific career is also focused on droughts - believes that through emojis we can ease the gap between science and the general public, that is, we can improve the understanding of what scientists have been saying for a long, long time.
But in the field of communicating findings from the field of climatology, Vuković Vimić sees two more possible challenges - one characteristic for youth, the other for older generations.
"Younger people live in the age of climate change, but they need to understand that this climate is not something that is usual and that it was different before," she emphasizes, "while on the other hand, among the older people, distrust is expressed according to the data that everything is really changing faster." than ever before.”
And what does the data actually tell us?
From 2000 to 2020, the frequency and duration of droughts globally increased by 29 percent compared to the two decades preceding that period.
According to the United Nations, they represent only 15 percent of all natural disasters, but they are surprisingly deadly: from 1970 to 2019, droughts claimed as many as 650 lives, earning them the infamous title of one of the dangers with the greatest human losses.
Certainly, the threat does not loom over us, homo sapiens.
In almost all parts of the planet, drought conditions are the most serious threat to livestock. And when a drought as severe as the current one in Africa strikes, even wildlife is not protected: in addition to mortality increasing on its own due to lack of water and food, Zimbabwe recently announced that it would allow the killing of 200 elephants in order to distribute their meat to communities threatened by drought. conditions, while in Namibia the killing of 700 different wild animals is announced.
Crops are also under attack, and thus the food industry: Serbian farmers, in the midst of a dry August, were especially afraid for the yield of later crops.
Even though it was an extreme phenomenon, it is becoming more and more "normal" in our country: August droughts in our country are twice as frequent as they used to be, and with the further increase in temperature, the probability that such - and even worse - droughts will occur is very high.
What are Anna and her fellow scientists using the unicorn emoji for?
"When my colleagues and I come across data or information that is completely compromised by unprofessional interpretations, we use unicorn emojis," reveals Dr. Ana Vuković Vimić, showing us that with enough creativity, we can independently attribute meaning to symbols that they may not initially have.
When it comes to digital communication about climate change, some holes still remain unfilled: for now, we don't have the venerable coal-fired power plant as the leading cause of the problem. Given that this dirty energy source is being abandoned all over the world, perhaps a crossed plant emoji would be even more useful to illustrate the trend – or at least the desire to see it happen.
As the fight against climate change also has a more positive side - technological progress - it would be good to include windmills and solar panels among the emojis in the future. Until then, I use the blowing wind and the sun for these purposes.
Droughts are just one of a series of weather extremes whose frequency and intensity we are making worse by relying on fossil fuels
We live on a planet that is 1,2 degrees Celsius warmer than in the pre-industrial era, but we don't just witness the consequences of rising temperatures when the earth dries up, the local stream dries up, or our water tap stops flowing.
We also feel climate change when we get a higher electricity bill in the summer because we sought salvation from a strong heat wave in air conditioners, they keep us awake in tropical nights, devour our forests in the fiery elements, flood households, strengthen hurricanes...
And all of that fits into one emoji - the planet Earth with a thermometer in its mouth.
"It has become the most widespread symbol of global warming, including climate change," states Dr. Ana Vuković Vimić, expressing the wish that this be found in some future software updates of our devices.
You should be optimistic.
However, when we talk about this topic, both offline and online, we should also be optimistic.
"It is desirable to educate yourself about solutions," says Vuković Vimić. "The emphasis should definitely be on leaving all this to the children, and by not solving the problem, they are deprived of their right to a normal life, which is why climate lawsuits are being initiated all over the world." Although I do not have the talent and knowledge in the creative field, I can imagine the sign of the preservation of the planet by children as an indicator of the legal and other actions that they are starting to take because they are far more at risk."
In any case, the leafless tree emoji inspires hope that we are catching up with climate change even in the digital space, which is one of the prerequisites for raising awareness of this growing problem.
Source: Air Conditioning 101
