Monica Contestabile 00:09
Hello, this is How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals, a podcast brought to you by Nature Careers, in partnership with Nature Sustainability.
I am Monica Contestabile, Chief Editor of Nature Sustainability.
This is the series where we meet the researchers working towards the Sustainable Development Goals agreed by the United Nations and world leaders in 2015.
Since then, in a huge global effort, thousands of academics have been using those targets to tackle the biggest problems that the planet faces today.
Each episode ends with a sponsored slot from La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food in Melbourne, Australia, where we hear about how its researchers are focusing on the SDGs
In this final bonus episode, we look at the communication strategy around the SDGs, and meet the Swedish graphic designer who devised the highly recognizable icons and messaging, that was so important in garnering international support.
Jakob Trollbäck 01:29
Hello. My name is Jakob Trollbäck. I work with communication in different forms, which means copywriting and design and finding new ways to express information in a way that it’s easier for people to understand.
Our goal is to go from information to communication so we have something to talk about, and I have an agency in Stockholm called The New Division, and we are working with very complex questions about sustainability and trying to build engagement for them in different ways.
We’re at a point today that we’re facing a lot of challenges, but we do have a lot of solutions also, and to a high degree, what’s missing is something that can take these solutions and activate them.
We find that very often it’s communication that’s missing, so that’s what we’re working with.
We have worked with sustainability for about 10 years now, starting with when we get the job to figure out a way to communicate the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. So that was the start of our journey.
Jakob Trollbäck 02:19
Before we had the global goals, when we looked at the world, it was basically a world with problems everywhere.
It was very hard to figure out where to start and what all of the issues are that we have to solve.
The Sustainable Development Goals created seventeen categories of these problems and made sure that they were very easy to separate different things; separate poverty from education, from women’s rights to biodiversity to climate change, etc.
It was a way to try to make a map over all of the issues we have to solve to live a happy and prosperous life on the planet.
And that was all well, and it was, it’s a fantastic framework, but it was also very hard to understand. There was a lot of words, a lot of complex sentences and paragraphs that could be half a page long.
So our job was to try to figure out a way to do this as easy to understand as possible. So we wrote new names for all of the 17 goals, where we removed a lot of words and just focused it in on what the top level communication was, like the absolute minimum need to know about this goal.
Then when we had gotten those short names we were also thinking, we need to have a visual representation so people can memorize them and talk about them and use them in conversations and online, etc.
We decided to create icons for each of the goals. We created 17 icons, and we were playing a lot with colours, and in the end, we decided that they all needed to have their own unique colour, which is a bit of a challenge to find 17 distinct colours that also look great together.
Because the thing about the plan is that we can’t just solve one of the goals. They’re all interconnected in some way. So we wanted it to be able to make something that was beautiful from all of the goals, which became the circular logo type for the global laws.
We were driven a lot by; if these goals, are actually what can save us from a lot of hardship and a lot of problems that we have in the world, they should also be very likable goals.
So we wanted to make them in bright colours. We wanted you to look at them and go, ‘Whoa, what’s that? That looks fun’.
So the attitude of the whole thing was also a very important part.
Jakob Trollbäck 06:51
The job came to us in a very funny way.
We had done some work for the BBC, and they were happy with that, and they had a friend who needed some help with the project, and his name was Richard Curtis.
I had no idea who he was, so he came to my office in New York, because my company actually, I started my first company in New York, and he introduced himself and said, “Do you know anything about what I’ve been doing?”
I said, “No.” and he says, “Well, I made some movies and some TV shows, some of them are not so good, and some are pretty, pretty decent, like ‘Love, Actually’, ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, ‘Notting Hill’, ‘Black Adder’, ‘Mr. Bean’, etc.”.
I was, it was quite amazing, because he’s such a sweet and gentle and great guy, and I think that’s also something to take into this, that all of the work that he’s doing and that we’re trying to do is coming from a place of kindness and love and care that we think that we can do something better.
We had actually a meeting about something else he wanted help with, project that’s called Red Nose Day, that everyone who lives in England knows about, and many others. He wanted to launch that in the US, and needed help with that.
We had a fantastic meeting. When the meeting was over, he said, “I have a crazy idea. Do you have ten more minutes?”.
So he was a person, the first person who told me about the Sustainable Development Goals. This was exactly a year before they were released, and they were still working on them.
They hadn’t really agreed on all the parts. They didn’t even know how many goals there would be. Even though it was just a year away from the launch, there was still a lot of work to be done.
Richard said, “I think this may be our last shot of fixing a lot of the things that’s wrong with the planet. And I also think that these goals are going to fail if we can’t make them popular. Do you want to help me?”.
Jakob Trollbäck 09:44
So there we were. We had decided that we would work on this project, together with Richard Curtis, who had started this organization project, everyone with the explicit goal of spreading the goals all over the world.
So we needed to create the sort of the design and communication system that his organization could take out in the world.
I got an email in December of 2014 and it had the whole document of the goals.
To be able to work with this, we had to understand what it was. And I think that is actually a key point in this, that we didn’t come from inside the organization. We came from the outside.
When you’re working with communication, with media, with advertising, whatever it is, you always need to be able to put yourself in the in the clients, in the customers, in the receivers, shoes.
So there we were, and we were thinking, how can we understand this?
So there was a lot of just figuring out, what are the words in this? How can we make this interesting to anybody, to a seven year old?
How can anyone understand this, or just about anyone?
I’ve since learned to think about communication sort of like, like when you’re looking at a Google Map on your on your computer or your telephone, that you can zoom in on different levels. But at some level, if you’re looking at a map, you need to know that okay, this is in Latin America, this is in Europe.
You need to have some basic sense of it. And then there’s so much information that you can zoom in from South America to Peru to Lima to hotels and restaurants.
There’s so much information you just need to figure out which level you think that is a good entry point for everyone.
So that’s how we worked with all of the naming of the whole system.
Sometimes there were people who were unhappy because we lost words in the top level, in the top layer, that people cared a lot about.
And we said that this is just the way that people are going to remember this. And then if they’re interested in goal five, for example, gender equality, then they can just open up that goal and they can see there, what do we mean by this?
Jakob Trollbäck 12:57
After we had the names almost locked – some of them changed during the process, during the decision process, they were going in parallel – Goal 14 with the fish, with the two swirly waves on top of it, that was the first icon that I felt that that’s really there.
Here I have to mention Christina Rüegg-Grässli, my long-time design companion. She’s Swiss, and we worked together for 20 years.
She’s really the creative mastermind behind all of these icons. She sent me that fish, and I said, “That’s it”.
There were conversations about the fact that all the icons are silhouettes. Some people were wondering if they should be more three dimensional, and we wanted it to make, wanted everything to be as clear as possible
Some of the icons were hard to really figure out, and then some of them changed, also because we learned more about the goals.
At the UN there were about, probably about thirty people in a communication hub that we had the dialogue with. We learned a lot during that.
I mean, I remember that the first, the first picture for no hunger, had a fork in it, and someone just said, “Well, you know that two thirds of the of the world’s population don’t use forks”. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s a good point.
Like goal six, which is clean water and sanitation. We thought that water was the important thing. And we did, like a glass of water or something as icon. And then immediately they said, “Oh, no, water is this is a problem at some places, but sanitation, that’s the real problem, we need you to put a toilet there.”
We had made all of these beautiful icons, and I was like, “We’re not going to have a toilet in the middle of this. That’s not going happen”.
So we were trying to figure out, how can we talk about sanitation without having a toilet?
Number seven, which is for clean energy, we tried to get wind in. We tried to think about water. We obviously saw solar energy.
It became very complex. Then Christina just sent me this yellow square with a sun in it, and said, can it be just a sun like this? And I looked at it, and I was like, “I know what to do” and I just put a power button in the middle of it.
Now there’s like, oh yeah, now the sun has a power button.
A lot of these icons had a very long journey that were – some, as I said, the fish, that was just instantaneous – and some went through a lot of iterations.
If there’s 17 icons, I think that we must have done at least 500 icons in the in the process of doing this.
Jakob Trollbäck 16:57
In the studio in New York, we had been working with branding for about 15 years, and you’re pretty used to creating colour palettes, but colour palettes are usually two, three or maybe four colours.
Pretty soon we realized that now we actually need to have 17 colours, and we were just sitting there like in silence and thinking, how is this possible? How can you make a 17 colour palette?
I would guess that it’s one of the biggest colour palettes that has been made for, if we’re calling this system for a brand, something for a communication system.
So that took a couple of months, and I remember, I’m sad that I don’t have the photograph, but my office was just full of, just printouts of colours on the floor everywhere.
There were just hundreds of sheets and that we walked around and looked at.
But then we had the colours, and we had started to arrange the system in a graphic way.
17 is a prime number, which means that it’s very hard to make it’s not divisive by anything other than 17 and one.
You can actually make a pyramid of 17 pieces, but that wasn’t very practical.
So we had this grid that had three rows of six and then, and we had an empty space. And this thing of just trying to make things better, trying to always strive for excellence, to me, that little square at the end was just an affront to all that I believed in.
It was like it looked like the system wasn’t finished. It looked like we hadn’t – I was very unhappy about that.
Then we said that, but wait a minute, shouldn’t the whole system have a logo type, something that keeps it all together?
We started to think about different visual representations of that. Then Christina sent over this sketch that had just 17 segments of like a of a cake or something, arranged in a circle.
We said, well, this can be the sun, it can be the Earth, it can be harmony. It can be whatever it is. It’s it shows that these are, all stick together.
We had done this logotype, and then it took me, it took me a day or two when I all of a sudden realized that this is going to be the 18th square.
That was one of the most joyful moments in the whole process for me that when I just “Oh, now we have a grid. It makes sense, 17 goals. The 18th one is the logotype and the name”.
That was sounds silly, but that was a big moment for me.
Jakob Trollbäck 20:41
So the launch was, actually to the day, I believe, one year from the time that Richard Curtis walked into my office, and we were all very happy and proud of the work.
Richard loved it. The UN loved it. We loved it. We felt a lot of hope.
There was a big launch with huge projections of the goals of the UN building, and a lot of social media being pumped out. And Global Citizen had a huge show in Central Park with, you know, Beyonce and Coldplay and etc.
It was the whole stage of the global goals, so there was a lot of focus on it.
I think the launch was, it was very successful. I think that it’s, actually I have a hard time gaging how many people really know about the goals. Because I’m surprised that I still meet people who don’t quite know what they are or haven’t heard about them.
World Economic Forum had this survey five years ago that said 74% of the adults globally are aware of them.
It’s just a little bit high to me, but I mean, that’s what it says. Meaning that we can say that at least half of the people in the world knows about them.
Richard has a great saying, which is – you can’t fight for your rights if you don’t know what they are.
I think that’s why we really have to make sure that these goals continue to be used, because they are sort of the – even though there’s only, you know, there’s only six years left of the 15 years – they still are the underpinning, a friend of mine said the oxygen, for all conversations about sustainability.
So it doesn’t matter if the years goes on, this is a solid framework to understand almost all issues about sustainability.
Jakob Trollbäck 23:39
To me, the passion is in life, right?
That maybe sounds a bit trite, but, if you look around and you see the forces of everything growing, everything happening, you see it in nature, you see it in with humans. I have had two kids. You see how their bodies grow, or you see how their minds grow.
I feel like we’re in such a unique position on this planet where we should always strive to do things the very best way, because the very best way is part of survival.
It’s part of how we enjoy ourselves. It’s part of how we how we do things smarter, so we have time for other things than only working.
It’s always about finding solutions to me.
The reason why I am so passionate about working with sustainability, it’s because it’s all about finding the best way of doing something.
So if you’re starting a successful company, and you’re making a lot of money, but then you poison some rivers as you’re doing this, well, that’s not very elegant. There should be a better way.
There should be a way for us to do something without having negative effects.
If you’re successful in what you’re doing, you should be able to be successful without it costing harm to other people.
You should always find a more elegant way of doing things, and I think that that’s what we owe to the earth, we owe it to ourselves.
We owe it to humankind to always look for something smarter, something better. These are all things that we know makes our lives better.
I think that as soon as we see that picture and start to realize that we can do things better, and we owe it to ourselves, to our friends, to our families, to our children, to always look for a better solution.
Then it becomes not only obvious, but it becomes something that’s really exciting.
Monica Contestabile 26:18
Well, that’s it for this series, How to Save Humanity in 17 Goals.
But before we go next up, we’ll hear for the final time, how researchers at La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food in Melbourne, Australia, the sponsor of this series, are working towards the target set by the UN.
Caris Bizzaca: 26:48
I’m Caris Bizzaca, and welcome to this podcast series from the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food at La Trobe University in Australia. I would like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands where La Trobe University campuses are located in Australia, and to pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, as well as to elders past, present and emerging.
Across this six-episode series, you’ll hear from academics at the top of their fields as they discuss groundbreaking research happening at the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food, also known as LISAF. Through LISAF, La Trobe has developed a holistic approach to food security, and this ‘paddock-to-gut’ philosophy is delivering innovative research and significant academic and industry partnerships across the entire value chain.
Its success so far can already be seen in the Times Higher Education impact rankings, which measure university performance against the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. In 2024, La Trobe was ranked first in Australia and fifth globally for SDG 2: Zero Hunger.
Now, stay tuned to hear first-hand about the research of LISAF as it delivers innovative solutions for sustainable and nutritious food production in a resource and climate-constrained world.
Kim Johnson: 28:13
We’re used to using digital tools now in our everyday lives, so we use computers and devices, and so does agriculture.
Caris Bizzaca: 28:20
That is Associate Professor Kim Johnson, a plant biologist and one of the researchers at La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food, talking about digital agriculture.
Kim Johnson: 28:30
We might think of some on-farm technologies, that they’re using digital devices, so to collect and store data related to the farm. This might be sensors where they test the soil moisture levels, satellite images that see the greenness of a crop, or the soil carbon measurements.
There’s lots of on-farm technologies, which are getting lots and lots of data, but also beyond the farm we’re thinking about the energy use, the markets, who’s actually wanting to buy these products and the logistics and transport of getting them to and from places. So, digital agriculture collects all that data and all that information and helps decision-making for the farmers.
We know that farmers are really intuitive. They know their farms so well, but they have to make really complex decisions about when to plant, what’s cultivar, and why and when. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult with climate challenges to make those decisions.
So, now they can use data to support those decisions and validate them and also find parts of their farm which maybe are not as productive. So, they might make a decision and say, look, we’re not going to do wheat this year. It’s not going to be profitable. The climate’s just not suitable for that crop this year. We’re going to try something else. And they can model that using the data that they’ve already collected.
Caris Bizzaca: 29:54
At LISAF, Associate Professor Johnson says they’re focusing quite heavily on phenotyping, which is the analysis of plant traits into quantifiable terms, mostly through the study of images. It helps scientists understand a plant’s interaction with the environment and select those plants with the best genetics for desired outcomes. And Associate Professor Johnson says it can complement genomics, which is the study of an organism’s genes.
Kim Johnson: 30:22
In the past, we’ve really had this genomics revolution, so we have a lot of genomic data about all our different plants and animals, but what’s taken a bit longer to collect is this imaging data and interpreting all these images that can help support us think about what those plants or animals look like, how they’re behaving, and the valuable traits that we’re looking for, like yield and disease resistance. It’s now matching up that imaging data with the genetics so that we can really select plants and animals that are going to perform best in different environments.
Caris Bizzaca: 30:58
One area where this phenotyping and genomics research is being used is in the growth area of protected cropping, which refers to plants being grown in closed environments.
Kim Johnson: 31:09
It can range anything from a net to protect from pests and disease, all the way to these very, very advanced, completely closed vertical farms, and everything in between, like glasshouses.
These are being used because they’re highly productive, so you can get a lot more out of your crops in this very small area because you’re controlling that environment. And again, as the environment becomes increasingly uncertain, farmers are moving towards some of these protected cropping environments, particularly for high-value crops like tomatoes and berries.
Caris Bizzaca: 31:45
As Professor Bacic mentioned in an earlier episode, places like the Netherlands have really embraced protected cropping, which has enabled a country with a small landmass to be hugely productive in horticulture. At LISAF, there’s a dedicated research hub for protected cropping to develop plants that will thrive in closed environments.
Kim Johnson: 32:05
For the next five years, we’re focusing on this protected cropping hub and building that industry. Protected cropping is becoming increasingly of interest to farmers, but one of the major challenges is the plants are not adapted to being in these closed environments. So, we have to then breed them using our advanced genomics and phenotyping and select the best plants for those environments, but then also think about how we can manipulate that environment.
Because now we’re doing this in controlled lighting, controlled temperature, so we can make the plant think, any time of year, that it’s in the best climate for its growth. So, we’re trying to make incredibly efficient plants for these protected cropping environments. We’re really trying to think about sustainability while we’re doing this, especially around that resource use. So, minimizing energy use, recycling water and nutrients so that they’re really sustainable, but also the plant material or waste, that we are value-adding from that and using that material for other applications.
And that might be things like pharmaceutical bioactives or new composting materials. And that’s, again, the advantage of these protected cropping environments, is that because they’re closed, you can have much more sustainable systems. They use much less water than broadacre cropping, and you can track and only give the plants exactly what they need in terms of those fertilizers, so you’re not using too much.
Caris Bizzaca: 33:41
Another important aspect of protected cropping is that food can be produced locally.
Kim Johnson: 33:46
We know that food miles is a really critical issue in terms of the greenhouse-gas emissions, so we want to be able to reduce that by having food grown in these vertical farms, maybe on your roof or really locally, so you can get that fresh produce. And that also means you can do it in really challenging environments as well.
Caris Bizzaca: 34:08
This research is being applied to some very challenging environments, even ones not on Earth.
Kim Johnson: 34:14
One of the most extreme climates that we’re looking at is space and off-Earth growing of plants. So, I’m part of this programme called Plants for Space. It’s a big national programme across Australia, but also with lots of international partners, space industries and space agencies.
And some of the researchers within Plants for Space are part of LEAF Project, so this is Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora, and this is a mission that is planned on Artemis III. So, there will be a payload designed to take plants and deploy them, if possible, onto the moon in 2026. This is only a few years away, so it’s so exciting that soon we will have plants deployed to the moon.
Caris Bizzaca: 35:02
The LEAF Project brings together an international group of partners. It includes a core group from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space, also known as P4S, who are headquartered at the University of Adelaide.
It’s led by Space Lab Technologies and involves the University of Adelaide, La Trobe University and NASA Kennedy Space Center, all P4S partners, as well as the United States Department of Agriculture, University of Colorado Boulder, and Purdue University, with additional analysis at the P4S node at the University of Western Australia. Associate Professor Johnson says this collaboration between researchers and industry experts is critical.
Kim Johnson: 35:45
It’s so important that we’re always working with industry so that we’re really focused on what the industry needs, and we’re not trying to solve problems that don’t even exist. So, industries such as the medicinal agriculture, horticulture industry, food applications.
With Plants for Space, we’re working very closely with the space agencies and space enablers so that when we can test, we’re able to actually send things into space, but also do a lot of ground testing on Earth and learn from the many years of experience of people working in this area.
Caris Bizzaca: 36:21
This work around digital agriculture also addresses UN SDG 2: Zero Hunger.
Kim Johnson: 36:28
Part of that is through this protected-cropping hub, where we’re focusing on that sustainability aspect. So, we want to be able to grow food as efficiently as possible in as smaller area of land as possible, so that we can maintain the biodiversity in other areas, and we’re not having to clear land and have such a strong environmental effect.
Caris Bizzaca: 36:51
The biggest obstacle with digital agriculture is just the sheer amount of data.
Kim Johnson: 36:56
Numbers are meaningless if you don’t have a question that you’re trying to answer. Another challenge is people with the skills to actually interpret that data, analyze it, ask the right questions, know the farm systems so that they have a real on-farm specific question that they’re trying to solve.
And that’s a big challenge is that skilled workforce that we need in digital agriculture who have skills in machine learning. The way I see digital agriculture and AI and machine learning is really supporting the farmers in the decision-making. So, they may be giving ten options that the farmer can then work through and use their experience to say, right, that looks like a really great option for my situation. Now, I have the information and data to support that, this is the way I’m going to go.
Caris Bizzaca: 37:51
It means there’s a lot of potential career opportunities in the agriculture and food-production space, too.
Kim Johnson: 37:57
Something I’m really quite passionate about is people coming into this workforce. There’s such a huge opportunity for future careers in this area. We want people with digital skills, people who are really good at working with other people. We want people with those transferable skills, even if it’s good communication skills, good writing skills, data analytics, computational robotics. We want all of you. We want you to come in and be part of our agriculture community and support sustainable food production for everyone.
Caris Bizzaca: 38:32
That was Associate Professor Kim Johnson, a plant biologist and researcher at La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food. This also marks the end of the final episode in this series. For more information on La Trobe University and the work of LISAF, visit their website, www.latrobe.edu.au/research/lisaf. Thanks for listening.
