Essex Climate Focus Area

A ground-breaking initiative led by Essex County Council to improve the county’s resilience to climate change.

Objective

The Essex Climate Focus Area (ECFA) is a project and a key recommendation of the Essex Climate Action Commission and its report ’Net Zero: Making Essex Carbon Neutral’.

The ECFA aims to be a learning place for sustainable development and a site for testing interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and managing changes and interactions between social and ecological systems, including conflict prevention and management of biodiversity.

Working in collaboration with Involve, (one of the UK’s leading public participation organisations), the aim is to incorporate key values of the public when it comes to land use, green spaces and the collective goal of reducing carbon emissions and to provide high-level training on how to effectively include the public in decision-making to members of the local authorities.

Solution

An illustrative icon style is used to highlight the four main objectives to becoming more climate change resilient – implementing biodiversity net gain (leaf), reducing flooding (water), improving soil health (field) and reducing the urban heat island effect (sun).

These elements combine to form the ECFA logo, depending on viewpoint, the logo can be read as a fish or bird with an essence of the Yin and Yang symbol.

What we delivered

– Brand identity
– Visual brand language
– Printed and digital reports
– PowerPoint and Word templates
– Pull-up banners
– Social media assets

Illustrating the issues

We designed a fresh collection of icons to guide, provide context, and inject a human touch into all communications, offering an alternative to the use of photography.