Luxembourg, a shitty experience

but not in a bad way

When I say ‘shitty’, I mean ‘solid waste themed’. Like the restaurant that’s called Schéiss and serves mouth-watering crème brûlée but carries a name that’s only one small accent away from the word poop in a language spoken by 78% of the population. It’s not a big issue, but it’s remarkable. Or this sticker I found in the bathroom of my hotel room.

I had to think about this for a while. Suppose one really needs a toilet brush, what would that look like?

I think there must have been a scenario just like this, because guess what I found right underneath the sticker…

I haven’t even gotten to the reason I was in Luxembourg: an event about all the shit that will happen that we’ll need to prepare for. Because of climate change, we’ll see more extreme weather events like floods, storms, heat waves and draughts. The discussions during the conference were about how well we’re prepared for them.

Luxembourg itself by the way, is lovely.

The cartoon above was inspired by a game we played, led by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. Participants had to come up with good news and bad news headlines. One of the headlines was: “world ends due to climate apathy and nobody cares.” I decided to remove the last bit of that sentence and in stead ‘show, don’t tell’.

Here are some more headlines I illustrated:

This one is another example of ‘show don’t tell’. I could have let the person say: “we’ll have a forest fire and then also a tsunami”, but it’s better if the viewers have to figure that out themselves.

Here’s a headline that was obviously meant as good news and I decided to draw what it would look like if this was bad news.

Here the headline was also good news: “There is a planet B!”
What would that look like from an unexpected perspective?

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Another game we played was about investing in preparedness. We had to estimate risk and decide how much we were going to invest. Investing too little would result in disaster, but investing too much makes you look bad. That last part is of course a reality for decision makers, but it’s a bit absurt, isn’t it?

Something else that came up, was that individuals often don’t know what to do in case of a disaster. We watched a video with interviews and lots of people said they would run to the basement. Question is, is that always the best move?

It’s vital that people know that to do ahead of time, because when disaster strikes, it might be very hard to spread information.

And lastly, it’s important to think of all the people that are present in your country, at any given moment and how to reach them.

In the last few cartoons, I took the information that is often quite abstract and show what that would look like in a real situation, just like I did with the toilet brush. It helped me that I was present at the conference. The night before this event (during dinner at Schéiss), I talked to a man from Australia about how people tend to think bad stuff won’t happen to them. He told me people in his country often say ‘we should be alright’. I was very pleased to be able to implement that bit in a cartoon the next day when a member of the Icelandic parliament was telling us about their challenges.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this! I would love to know what you think.

With love,