Key Metric Campaign – Empathy Media

Campainging for our Planet’s Life and Death Metric

To achieve public support for the urgent transition we must achieve in the next 3 years, we need a visible measure of success. Are we decarbonising in time? Has the deadly upward curve starting turning down yet? We should be looking for the answer every day and across our media.

Remember how with COVID we all became familiar with the shape of the key graph and the idea of the importance of ‘flattening the curve’. Logo versions of the graph appeared in print and online news sites and became a public measure of success.

Or look at the way The Daily Telegraph puts what it calls ‘Key Indicators’ on the front page, but never includes the most vital one of all. So in response this is the question we at OneClimate are posing on social media –

We propose a campaign to build the expectation in the media that “of course everyone needs to know every day the planet’s most vital sign – an authoritative, easy to understand, visual metric that could achieve symbolic significance in public discourse.” To achieve this we need three steps.

To agree with the climate scientist community what is the best variable to measure – ppm, PgC, carbon budget or something else – and how to show it in the simplest possible form.
To arrange which international body would provide the authorisation of the daily updates.
To campaign to persuade media to adopt this symbolic metric, and then celebrate the moment when we begin the flatten the curve away from climate catastrophe, and then, and it must come very soon, the moment when it finally turns down.

And the campaign for our life and death metric begins now.