In the lead up to the Paris climate summit in December 2015, UK journal Disegno, commissioned designers across a variety of disciplines to reconsider the climate change campaign and produce a work for their 2°C climate change issue and an exhibition at The Aram Gallery in London.

The exhibition 2°C Communicating Climate Change argued that design has a valuable contribution to make to the climate change debate. Presenting models, photography, graphics and objects, the exhibition showed provocative and thought-provoking proposals for how design could change public understanding of the issues surrounding global warming. The exhibition was staged at a time when discussing climate change has never been more pressing. The UN Climate Change Conference was aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to ensure that global temperature change does not rise above 2°C, a threshold at which catastrophic climate change will take place. At the current rate of warming, global temperatures will increase by 4 or 5°C by the end of the century.

2°C asked what role design might play in reshaping this future. Could design affect the way we understand the danger confronting us? How can a familiar story be presented in a new way? For the exhibition, as for the 2°C climate change issue of Disegno, we presented Future Climate [Hi]stories, an allegorical folk-tale about a grassroots society of futile optimists who spend the majority of their time looking for ways to produce biochar to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.