Lecturer Photography Dirk-Jan Visser and alum Gus Drake photograph landscapes for UN Climate Change Conference
28 November 2022
Being part of the Creative Climate Coalition, an initiative by the Creative Industries Fund and What Design Can Do, lecturer Dirk-Jan Visser and alum Gus Drake presented the outcome of their first visual stakeholder analysis at the UN Climate Change Summit (COP27) in Sharm-El-Sheikh.
With their method they envision alternative views for policymakers, CEOs and politicians to include the interests of non-human life in designing policy. With New Horizon Initiative they aim for the recognition and advocacy for the rights of nature as part of a legal framework.
About New Horizon Initiative in Sharm-El-Sheikh
Based on scholarly research, among others from Mohamed Zakaria Hateb of Wageningen University, Dirk-Jan and Gus created a visual inventory of different types of vegetation and landscape elements that are important for the flora and fauna, site-specific for the Sinai desert around Sharm-El-Sheikh. They looked at the needs of common species, species that have disappeared and species that are on the Red List of the IUCN. Dirk-Jan and Gus used all of these images to do a visual stakeholder analysis through Artificial Intelligence to forecast what the Sharm-El-Sheikh can look like if the interest of non-human life was taken into account.
