The archive · Public & Social · Product decision · 2022–2023
Second Sea itemises rising-sea damage as per-nation climate invoices at COP27
RCA's Adrian Lahoud and studio Accept & Proceed split each coastal city's projected sea-level loss by nations' historical CO2 and send them the bill.
Accept & Proceed · Royal College of Art
What it had to solve
Rising seas threaten coastal cities worldwide, but the cost, and who owes it, stays abstract — 'loss and damage' had stalled UN climate talks for decades while developing nations bore the brunt. Second Sea had to make future climate harm legible at the moment COP27 negotiators were deciding the issue.
How it works
Second Sea is an interactive platform that turns the future cost of rising seas into bills. Climate-driven sea-level rise will flood, displace and damage coastal cities on every continent, but the damage is distant in time and scattered across nations — which is why 'loss and damage' stayed an abstract phrase through decades of UN climate talks.
Adrian Lahoud's team at the Royal College of Art collated data for 136 coastal cities, from Athens to Zhanjiang, charting expected sea-level rise and damage by the end of the century. Design studio Accept & Proceed shaped it into an app-smooth website: users choose a city, a climate scenario and a date, and a bespoke algorithm — weighting each nation by its cumulative historical CO2 contribution — prints a nationally itemised invoice showing the share owed by each country.
The bill was made to be sent: to a country's COP27 delegation or to friends and followers, with an ultramarine tide rising over the screen as a reminder of what is at stake. Launching at the summit, Second Sea gave negotiators a concrete, shareable figure at the exact moment the loss-and-damage fund was on the table.
Visitors from more than 120 countries created over 6,000 invoices, and the work won Graphic Design of the Year at the Dezeen Awards 2023, remaining a reference for turning climate accounting into an act any citizen can perform.
Why it lands
- An invoice is a format everyone understands — a named debtor, an amount and a signature line — which makes an unpayable global liability suddenly legible.
- Splitting the bill by cumulative historical CO2 ties payment to responsibility for past emissions rather than today's wealth or population.
- The tool was pointed at the people who could act: bills could be sent to COP27 delegations in the very rooms where the loss-and-damage fund was being negotiated.
- Attaching the cost to a named city made a global statistic into a local, concrete consequence.
What it did
Launched as COP27 opened, the platform drew visitors from more than 120 countries who generated over 6,000 invoices; it later won Graphic Design of the Year at the Dezeen Awards 2023.
What you can take
To move people on an unfathomable problem, shrink it to a document: an itemised invoice turns a planetary liability into a named debtor, a number and an address to send it to.
Since then
Second Sea launched into the COP27 summit whose defining outcome was the agreement to establish a loss-and-damage fund, giving campaigners a concrete arithmetic for claims that had stayed abstract for decades. After the summit the platform kept working as an advocacy and teaching tool, and Accept & Proceed and its collaborators won Graphic Design of the Year at the Dezeen Awards 2023; the project remains a reference for data-led civic design.
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