Biodiversity by the Bay is a climate campaign initiated by Purpose Climate Lab intended to inspire young Indians to use their creativity and collective power to fight for Mumbai’s biodiversity. Using a creative, identity-driven aesthetic, we worked to connect the identity of Mumbai to its incredible biodiversity, and provide young people with a way to use their creative and digital skills to protect it.

Mumbai’s Ministry of Magic was created as a platform to unite this audience and showcase their collective action, mobilizing them to demand local government representations to act more intentionally towards protecting Mumbai’s parks, its biodiversity hotspots, and the habitats of endangered species.

Purpose partnered with Civis, Waatavaran and Deadant to carry out the campaign. The goal of the project was to tap into new audiences and experiment with new approaches to climate change and youth mobilisation. We collaborated with artists, musicians and performers to find new entry points into the biodiversity conversation.

By using playful shapes and bright colours, the visual language captures different aspects of nature and the vibrant emotions of our young audience. We integrated the use of illustration, motion graphics and video throughout the campaign.

We worked with Rohan Chakravathy, a cartoonist known for his Green Humour column, to illustrate a biodiversity map of Mumbai. This iconic map highlights the flora, fauna, green spaces and indigenous communities of the Mumbai metropolitan region. It sparked a lot of interest in our campaign nationally as well as internationally, and was featured on various media channels from The Hindustan Times to The Guardian.

The campaign started conversations on social media such as #MumbaiNeedsPink - on the need for better protection of Lesser Flamingo habitats. It drew in the participation of renowned Bollywood personalities, environmentalists and journalists. We designed a letter to Aaditya Thackeray, a prominent minister, with our requests for the State Environment Department, using the language and aesthetic of our target audience. Aditya Thackeray has responded to the petition on Twitter!

We collaborated with VICE Media for an episode of their ‘Trash Talk’ series to capture the voices of some prominent Mumbaikars on their views about their city’s disappearing green spaces. We engaged with comedy & lifestyle content creator, Nikhil Kini, who visited every park in Mumbai in 24 hours to encourage citizens to visit parks during the lockdown.

A collaboration with the HaikuJam community invited writers to pen an ode to the Flamingo, which had over 200 participants commemorating the flamingo with their haikus. We engaged with local photojournalists like M. S. Gopal (MumbaiPaused) and Aslam Saiyed (Mumbai River Project) who created content that captured different facets of the city’s environment and local people.

The campaign concluded with a three-week long digital festival aimed at celebrating Mumbai’s biodiversity through art, comedy and music. Artists came up with original art and comedy sketches on why biodiversity was important to them. The festival was a means to reach newer segments of the target audience and to start larger conversations on biodiversity with the youth of Mumbai.