Now We Can

Super-pollutants are responsible for 45% of global warming and impact our health, lifestyles and exacerbate climate change. Yet, they are often overlooked in climate discussions, namely because their scientific nature can make them a complicated and technical issue for the general public, climate funders and critical decision makers to understand and get behind. This complexity acts as a barrier to the much-needed funding required to tackle them.

Super-pollutants impact our health and lives on a daily basis, they make us cough, heat up our planet and at times, make our communities so smoggy that we have to stay inside. Over time, we’ve learned to ‘put up with’ super-pollutants, but it doesn’t need to be this way and it is essential we combat them if we want a cleaner planet! CCAC and its partners have a host of ingenious solutions to curb emissions and minimize their impact. Our strategy was to create a compelling campaign that would re-engage the partner network, and encourage new partners and funders to join in the fight against super pollutants. 

We needed an idea that would make the issue easy to understand and entertaining in order to recruit new partners and funders. We chose to bring the super-pollutants to life in a bold animated universe, working with illustrators to create five irritating, destructive, yet approachable super-pollutant characters. We brought these characters to life through a 90 second animated film, website, out-of-home posters, audio ads, social media content and merchandise.

The campaign launched ahead of Climate Week NYC 2024. Leading up to Climate Week NYC, we launched our website, social media ads, hero film and audio ads placed on SiriusXM podcasts. At Climate Week, merchandise was distributed at CCAC events and our posters were “wild-posted” at 25 locations across NYC. 

In 2025, we saw the super pollutant universe come to life at the annual Climate and Clean Air conference in Brasilia, where partners had the opportunity to engage with the campaign through an augmented reality activation, learn more about SLCPs through an audio and visual installation and commit to tackling  them with the CCAC.

These efforts drew attention to the campaign, the work CCAC is doing and highlighted the solutions the CCAC Partnership have been championing for over a decade.

This work was particularly impactful in building momentum in the sector, bringing stakeholders together, securing public interest and validation of their work, and supporting stakeholders to accelerate the fight against super pollutants. Also:

> Social graphics launched in and around Climate Week NYC were viewed a total of 192,000 times

> Partners praised the campaign saying it was “nothing like the usual UN campaigns”, particularly calling out the ‘eye-catching visuals’

> Once engaged with, digital content retained viewer interest, with 48.8% of website viewers staying more than 10 seconds

> The hero film saw strong engagement rates across all placements (>10%), indicating that people are easily won around by the narrative and style of the film.

“During New York Climate Week, we needed to shine the light on super-pollutants, and highlight the immense – but often accepted – impact of them on our health, lifestyles, and the climate. In this work, we have used creativity to explain a traditionally technical and complicated issue in an entertaining, easy to understand, and hopefully memorable way. We hope it convinces the climate sector that we don’t have to put up with super-pollutants and their impact on our health and planet can be mitigated.”

– Charlotte Wood, Gabrielle Choo and Alexandra Callaway, Purpose