Climate change is undeniably among humanity’s biggest challenges for this century. A warming climate, increasing weather extremes, and rising sea levels will have increasingly bigger and more severe impacts on human livelihoods and the environment worldwide.
To broadly communicate these issues, climate science advocates and media campaigns have created powerful symbols for the existential threats of climate change. These include the polar bear on an iceberg – a symbol for melting polar caps and a warming climate.
Similarly, the low-lying coral atoll islands of the Indo-Pacific, such as Tuvalu, Tokelau, or the Maldives, have become the symbol for rising sea levels. However, over the years, this symbol has evolved and consolidated into a narrative of a sealed fate of atolls to inevitably drown and disappear in the next decades.