Earthrise 23 – Design for a Living Planet

Earthrise 23 – Design for a Living Planet connects scientific knowledge, design and communication around environmental change. Forest Lab contributes the perspective of forest ecosystems, which provide particularly effective examples for making visible ecological processes operating across spatial and temporal scales that are difficult to perceive in everyday life. Tree growth, carbon accumulation, disturbance, succession, biodiversity and climate responses become ways of discussing the relationship between environmental transformation and the capacity of societies to imagine and design alternative futures.

A central challenge is to translate complex processes without reducing them to overly simple representations. Forests are not merely carbon reservoirs or areas covered by trees, but dynamic ecosystems in which climate, management and disturbance interact continuously. The project provides a context in which scientific descriptions can be combined with visual and narrative approaches to show how present-day choices may produce consequences emerging over decades and how different objectives — mitigation, biodiversity, production, protection and adaptation — may generate trade-offs rather than a single universally preferable solution.

For Forest Lab, Earthrise 23 is therefore also an experiment in interdisciplinary science communication. Forest research is taken outside conventional academic formats and used to build accessible but scientifically robust representations of ongoing environmental change. The purpose is not simply to disseminate research findings, but to provide different audiences with tools for understanding uncertainty, long time horizons and the consequences of environmental decisions, strengthening the connection between knowledge production, design culture and collective choices.

Reports and outputs: Earthrise 23 – official website · May Contain Traces of Forest – exhibition