We wanted to highlight how undesirable living under drought could be if no drought mitigation and resilience actions are taken. More importantly, we wanted the audience to see themselves as potential Droughtland citizens, but still be humored by the concept. Our team created stories and character profiles of citizens of Droughtland and developed various graphic and audiovisual assets in English and Spanish with the hashtag #Droughtland.

The assets featured heavily in COP15 in-person events, and the video was streamed through UNCCD’s YouTube channel. The audiovisual pieces featured different citizens of Droughtland talking about life in their country, allowing audiences to understand the impacts of drought through diverse perspectives. We also created a website that simulated a real tourism page of the country while educating audiences of the impacts of drought in a lighthearted way.

To further expand the impact of the concept beyond digital media, we engaged a local artist from Cote d’Ivoire to create a mural of Droughtland for COP attendees to see on their way to the conference.

Spain, as host country for Desertification and Drought Day in 2022, also featured the Droughtland campaign in their commemorative activities. Apart from using the audiovisual and graphic assets, we worked with the local city government of Madrid to create interactive and immersive experiences to educate the public about drought resilience through the lends of Droughtland, namely:

• “Dry Delights” - a culinary experience with a low hydraulic footprint in collaboration with the Basque Culinary Center offered dry land foods to educate people about how drought affects food systems
• “Droughtland Tourism Booth” - a tourism center was built in Atocha, Madrid, in which the tour guides would provide key info about the campaign, as well as serve as a hub to engage media and Drought and Desertification Day attendees

After building enough momentum around the Droughtland campaign, UNCCD capitalized on its visibility and shifted the narrative to #NoDroughtland, which called for the international community to work together to make sure no country would become like Droughtland.

We developed a second set of videos in which Droughtland citizens offer advice on how not to become like Droughtland, together with educational content about the larger topic of drought resilience. To keep the momentum and engagement going, our team also produced a series of animated videos entitled “Postcards from Droughtland,” in which the different citizens of Droughtland wrote stories about how life had been improving because of positive drought mitigation action.

We also created a series of Instagram filters for Droughtland visas for users to disseminate the campaign through usage. The visa filter was also used during the UN General assembly in NYC in 2022.

The campaign amassed 55M impressions on social media channels.

The Droughtland website experienced a significant traffic boost just prior to DDD 2022. This traffic boost led to over 2M event triggers on the website.

Over the three days of activation, a total of 1,164 people passed by the booth and were informed about the campaign, the majority being from Spain, USA, UK, France, Argentina and Italy.

As part of the political gains, the efforts taken to create DDD contributed to the approval of a Desertification Strategy Plan in Spain.