Making Peat the Next Hot Topic
A digital campaign strategy to raise awareness & educate city-dwellers about peat and its restoration activities across Indonesia.
Following our original mandate, we believe that information lead to empathy and to action. Therefore, during the process of creating Pantau Gambut’s web platform, we asked the question:
“What do you know about peat?”
Unfortunately, our findings show that people living in the urban area are unfamiliar about the topic. This pushed us to explore the different ways on how we can make peat the next hot topic.
Wait.. What is ‘Peat’?
The Carbon Reserve, The Unsung Hero
Unlike the majestic rainforests or vast oceans, peat — although small — plays a vital role in balancing the ecosystem. Peatland is made up of the remains of trees, grass, moss, and decomposed animals generally found in swamps, bogs, and other wetlands. This soil collectively stacks up over thousands of years, forming into a thick sediment. Peatland covers less than 3% of the land surface of the Earth, but contains twice as much carbon as the world’s forest.
Why care for peat?
Peatlands plays out a vital role in balancing the ecosystem. Due to the soil’s time-consuming creation process, these lands provide an irreplaceable ecosystem. These unsung heroes protect the earth from floods during the heavy rains, supports the local economy through farming and fish-keeping, and keeps the climate stable by keeping one-thirds of the Earth’s carbon. However, when these lands are drained and caught on fire, the fires can quickly spread across the lands due to the organic materials its supplies–releasing 10 times more carbon than a typical forest fire.
How might we make peat a HOT topic?
It is common for farmers & corporations to clear out forests by burning because it’s the fastest and cheapest way. This activity may cause fatal damages and health issues to the areas around peat as well as releasing harmful greenhouse gases to the earth’s atmosphere. With the recent and unfortunate uncontrollable forest fires happening in the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan, we seized the opportunity to raise awareness to the general public about the great side-effects of burning peatland that impacted villages and countries surrounding Indonesia.
“Peatland covers less than 3% of the land surface of the Earth, but contains twice as much carbon as the world’s forest.”
Awareness Campaign
Primary Audience: Millennials living in big cities in Indonesia
For this specific digital campaign, we narrowed our audience to the younger generation who make up the largest population of consumers of the internet. In addition, they also are the game-changers for the next generation with the power to make change and spread the news to their friends, coworkers, and family.
1. Digital Storytelling
Storytelling is a powerful tool to create empathy and push action. We found a need to develop an interactive and accessible method of storytelling which led us to design and develop ayo.pantaugambut.id (translates to: let’s monitor peat). In this campaign page, we packaged content in a way it is easy to digest for people who are not environmentally-savvy to get a foundational knowledge for the current peat situation in Indonesia. Through a scrolling interaction, the page walks through vital information about peat using other interactive elements like videos, virtual reality (360 images), and illustrations.
2. Video Campaign
“Humans are incredibly visual and powerful, moving images help us find meaning… [and] video helps capture and contextualize the world around us.”
— Dan Patterson
In collaboration with our campaign partner — 6616, we created a mini web-series to accompany the awareness campaign. These 5-minute videos unfolds the lives of the locals experiencing the side-effects of forest fires by highlighting three relatable topics — work, education and health. By exposing these pain points of the locals experiencing forest fires, it creates an understanding to city-dwellers how lives are drastically affected by a small act that can be prevented.
3. Social Media Campaign
Information is spread and consumed in a variety of ways, which is why we also created a social media campaign that accompanies the campaign page. In collaboration with local illustrators, we showcased the information of peat by posting fun, light, bite-sized and visually stimulating content to make it attractive to millennials. These posts are uploaded twice a week to maintain follower’s engagement and providing a new fun fact about peat.
There are definitely many ways to bring awareness to people about foreign topics like Peat. Stay tuned for our upcoming project with Pantau Gambut!
