There's an expectation that the climate crisis will push 130 million people into poverty by 2030. And it's the people who contribute least to climate change who are the ones that face the worst impact.

The debate around the need for a global fund to compensate for “loss and damage” (caused by climate change in the global South) has been ongoing since 1992. Whilst the developed world has recognised the issue, they have not agreed to compensation. At COP26, Loss and Damage wasn’t even on the official agenda.

Our job was not only to bring a new focus to Christian Aid’s climate justice work, but specifically (despite unprecedented turbulence in British politics and the economy), to pressure both private companies and the UK government to take action in the build up to and at COP27.

And it all had to be done using only owned and earned channels (social media).

Our idea was to “Hack the Agenda” of the people in power, in a social first, reactive campaign, that piggybacked on and hijacked trending conversations in UK politics and press, inviting not only more talk, but crucially action towards the setting up of the fund. In other words, truly disrupting the status quo to get seen and heard.

Central to the idea was recruiting internationally renowned climate activist Vanessa Nakate - someone with first-hand experience and who represents the voice of the most hard-hit victims of the climate crisis. However, we predicted that any requests to put this urgent message from the global South at the heart of UK politics would fall on deaf ears, so needed another way in. If we couldn’t get Vanessa onto the podium at COP27, we’d do the next best thing; “hack” the UK Prime Minister using deepfake, putting Vanessa’s voice into Liz Truss' mouth.

The narrative on climate change in the past has been skewed towards polar bears and rainforests, and until 2022, the term for the human cost, Loss and Damage, was not widely known. However it was being increasingly experienced in Britain due to climate change. Simultaneously, the public were becoming aware of politicians and policy-makers giving vague, often empty promises about action on climate change.

Here lay an opportunity to tap into people’s increasing empathy for victims of climate change globally to pressure UK leaders to talk less and act.

We needed to make people take notice, by moving them to think differently about climate change, reframing the context from environmental and biodiversity to human impact. Our campaign needed to boldly expose the human cost of climate injustice that is happening right now, in an arresting and controversial way to get attention, and engage people with movement-building comms to create action.

With very little production and media budget (and no paid media allowed behind our hack posts, we knew that we needed to punch above our weight to get attention for this important issue - so creating something that had the potential to go viral, create a bit of controversy, and elicit a strong emotional response was vital.

For 5 weeks, we trawled trending topics and stories related to Loss and Damage daily, using screen captures to create our own response-posts to point out hypocrisy, scandal and, greenwashing – posting it straight back into social media in an unignorable visual style – all the time explaining the need for wealthy countries to compensate the global South, and encouraging people to sign our petition.

Halfway through, we planted the main video, "hacking" what we teased as the UK Prime Minister's final speech and reaching everyone from everyday citizens to people in power.

By the time COP27 arrived, we had left a trail of posts, videos, teasers, and comments across social media, gained a lot of support, and started some heated conversations. More importantly, Loss and Damage made it onto the agenda, with a breakthrough agreement and funds committed.

Our idea worked, attracting the attention of people and organisations with huge reach, such as Greta Thunberg and Greenpeace. Overall, the campaign got 10 million impressions, with over 2 million content views and 300k organic views of our deepfake video.

We had an average engagement rate of 4.87% on Twitter posts; 11.66% for our deepfake video post. Vanessa's post of our deepfake video had 742 retweets alone.

We drove 28% additional petition signatures.

The Prime Minister did a u-turn and attended COP27.

And crucially, COP27 reached a breakthrough agreement on a new “Loss and Damage” fund for vulnerable countries, with €340m pledged.