The climate crisis is the most important story ever told. It has heroes and villains, moments of brilliance and decades of failure, warnings ignored and opportunities missed. It has a cast of thousands — scientists, activists, politicians, dreamers, deniers — and a deadline that keeps getting closer. What it has sometimes lacked is a way in. A door that feels familiar enough to walk through, human enough to care about, and urgent enough to keep you up at night.

 

CLIMATE GOALS is that door.

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A long-term art project running until at least 2030 — in line with the targets set by the Paris Agreement — CLIMATE GOALS tells the story of climate change through football. Each object in the series takes a moment, a movement, a person or a turning point in the history of the climate crisis and reimagines it through the language of the beautiful game. Physical objects and digital worlds. Shirts and squad pages. Scarves and statistics. The stadium as a stage for the most consequential match in human history.

 

Football was chosen deliberately and carefully. No cultural form on earth reaches further, moves faster, or speaks more fluently across borders, languages and generations. Football understands loyalty and betrayal, long odds and last-minute rescues, the weight of history and the hope of the next fixture. These are precisely the terms in which the climate story needs to be told — not as a distant scientific abstraction, but as something with skin in the game. Something with a scoreline. Something where the result still matters.

 

Each object in the CLIMATE GOALS series is both a work of art and an act of memory — a way of honouring the people and moments that shaped our understanding of the planet we live on, and a reminder that the match is far from over. The series will grow year by year, object by object, until 2030. Some objects will look back. Some will look forward. All of them will ask the same question that has haunted the climate conversation since the 70s: what kind of result are we playing for?

 

The first object is The Club of Rome. The kick-off was fifty years ago. We are still in extra time.​