If you remember the movie Interstellar, you will recall that all the food on their dining table was made from corn – cornbread, corn side dish, whole corn kernels, etc. Why? Because climate change had made the conditions so catastrophic that the planet had only one viable crop left – corn. It also showed the frequent dust storms because the heat had killed the vegetation and now the wind could carry huge swaths of dust everywhere. “It is just a movie” is what we hear when we get a little stressed about climate change, but those scenes in the movie about having just one crop left and insane storms – that is an extremely realistic scenario and we are hurling towards it each time there is a rise of even 1 degree Celsius.
The design has a purpose to educate through interaction but it would be more interesting to see if the Studio set up different Hothouses showing how the temperature increase would impact other regions’ crops in comparison to the UK – the side by side comparison would help people grasp the global scale of disruption because otherwise it just looks like you get to have mangoes in the UK and that doesn’t sound “bad”. Scientists predict that air quality levels could be 5x times worse by 2050 and crop yields can decrease by 30% as temperatures rise towards a 4°C increase globally by the end of the century – to put it into context, the world is currently in a race against time to stop the temperature from increasing beyond 1.5°C because that could have life-threatening effects so 4°C is catastrophic. These changes will have a direct effect on all the crops inside the Hothouse so people can see the real-time evolution and effects of the world.