Converting indifferent urban youth to become the defenders of the forest

The client's brief

Some Indonesian CSOs working in the environmental sector that are grantees of Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) believed that the year prior to the general election (2019) was a period with significant momentum they should be capitalizing on. They invited C4C to discuss how best to campaign to first-time voters so that they would put public pressure on legislative and presidential candidates to include curbing deforestation in their political promises.

Our insight

A Pew global study in 2015 showed that only 41% of Indonesians believed that climate change was a serious problem. Meanwhile, Roy Morgan Single Source in 2016 showed that 52% of Indonesians felt that environmental issues had been exaggerated. A study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2019) also showed that less than 2% of voters see the environment as the most important problem they are facing. C4C had conducted a qualitative study prior to this project to find out what concerns these young Indonesians have that we could use to change them from being indifferent to caring about the issues. The best way to make urban youth start caring about deforestation is by reframing it as a national-pride issue.

The core of the strategy

The ultimate goal of the Golongan Hutan campaign is to overcome indifference among Indonesian urban youth about deforestation so that, upon prompting by CSOs, they will demand pro-forest policies and practices from policymakers. We believed the reason urban youth did not care about deforestation also had something to do with the fact that nobody outside the environmental activism community talks about it on social media. We hypothesized that what was lacking in deforestation campaigns was a moral-emotional framing that was relevant to the majority of Indonesians with conservative views. Based on a qualitative study across six cities, we concluded that we should use the narrative of deforestation as a threat to national status as the third-largest rainforest area in the world.

The execution

In the first phase of the Golongan Hutan campaign we tried to introduce corruption in natural resources as the culprit of deforestation. After evaluating the campaign's performance, we decided to shift to a narrative where we fast-forwarded the negative consequences of deforestation from the future (natural disasters) to the present (Indonesia's loss of status). We also decided to change the tone and manner to be more lighthearted and "populist," and selected a new call-to-action: to entrust ("menitipkan") the president-elect to seriously take care of the forest. We used the "negara berflower vs negara berforest" idea for viral moments on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The result

The campaign ran in two stages. The first (December 2018-April 2019) facilitated young voters to tweet questions to candidates running for the general election; there were 5,858 tweets generated, from people beyond the activist community. The second (August-October 2019) accumulated signatures for a petition asking the president-elect to look after the forests so that Indonesia would not lose its position as the third-largest rainforest area in the world; exactly 49,873 people signed the petition. The second phase outperformed the first in terms of output and efficiency.