Meter Group: Meltdown Flags

After almost a year of protests, which began in December 2019 when handsewn Meltdown Flags were carried through the streets of Madrid during the COP25 climate change conference, and continued with an ongoing educational mission and an exhibition of the flags in the alpine museum of legendary Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, ‘Meltdown Flags’ will stage a digital protest during the cancelled COP26 between 9-19 November 2020. Today, on what would have marked the first day of the most important international climate meeting of the year - silence. The COP26 was due to begin in Glasgow this week and was postponed to November 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This new date may be too late for the planet’s ice, for Scientists have reported Greenland's ice sheet has passed a "point of no return". Therefore the mission of ‘Meltdown Flags’ is to bring the urgent topic of glacier meltdown back to the table in these unsettling times of the pandemic and political turmoil, in the form of a digital protest between 9-19 November, the original dates of the now- postponed United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP26). The climate initiative "Meltdown Flags" combines data and design to show the serious consequences of glacier extinction. Flags are seen as symbols of the highest national representation and emotional value - especially among politicians. The concept behind ‘Meltdown Flags’ is simple: the effects of global warming and consequent glacier retreat is visualized in the flags through reducing the proportion of the color white in the national flags of countries with glaciers, according to historical data and glacier projections. The data utilized in the ‘Meltdown Flags’ project has been obtained from databases and projection models from METER, UNESCO, NASA, and the universities of Zurich and Innsbruck, among others. Key dates are the years 1995, 2020, and 2050 referring to the year of the first UN Climate Change Conference in Berlin, the present-day status, and the goal year set within the Paris Agreement to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C, respectively.