Cartoonists use humour to tackle climate change

by David Adam

Surely, the threat posed by climate change is no laughing matter? But cartoonists from over 50 countries have shown that barbed humour can be a powerful weapon in the fight to halt global warming. David Adam reports

Can you laugh at global warming? Indeed, should you? The Ken Sprague Fund has organised a competition that set out to answer those awkward questions - so if you think that cartoons about climate change could be in poor taste, look away now. Around 150 artists from more than 50 countries submitted entries.

The results, says John Green, secretary of the fund that was set up in memory of cartoonist Ken Sprague, were “bitingly satirical, outrageously funny or exceedingly bitter, and even fatalistic”. None were neutral or indifferent, he says, while few took the subject lightly.

“Of course, there is repetition: cracked and parched landscapes with marooned whales; polar bears shaving off their thick pelt; Father Christmas on a camel,” Green says. “But what is more amazing is the imaginative range and the number of unique ideas.”

Two entries came from Burma, at the height of the recent devastating floods.

Most were from poorer countries, likely to be the hardest hit by global warming.

Green says: “Cartoons can reach parts that other arguments can’t.

We have been inundated with doom-laden predictions and scientific facts on the inevitability of global warming, but here we can exorcise our fears. Powerful, uncompromising and uncomfortable images bring home to us what it will really mean - not a Costa del Sol on the Welsh coast and palm trees in the garden, but desertification, hunger and poverty.”

First prize was awarded to Coat Star, by Mikhail Zlatkovsky, from Russia.Green says that the judges - chaired by regular Guardian political cartoonist Martin Rowson - felt that the winner “captured the shabbiness and sleazy way our planet is being devastated”. Zlatovsky is a political cartoonist and illustrator, living in Moscow, but his original education was in the field of nuclear physics.

He had been preparing for his science PhD thesis when in 1971, for political reasons, he suddenly quit all his research and became a freelance artist/cartoonist.

Almost immediately, he started participating in international cartoon competitions and has won more than 200 awards. In a 1992 worldwide survey of cartoonists, Zlatkovsky was given top spot by his peers.

In the early to mid-90s, he lived in the US, but then moved back to Moscow, where he became a professor at Moscow State University, as well as art director for a group of national magazines and newspapers.

His one-man exhibitions have been staged in galleries in Belgium, Canada, Estonia, France, Italy, Malta, Poland, Russia, Turkey and the US, and he is currently working on his PhD thesis about the history of Russian cartooning.

Second in the competition was Butterflies, by Constantin Ciosu, from Romania, a cartoonist, illustrator and art teacher who has won numerous international prizes.

Third prize went to The Hand, by Tawan Chuntraskawvong, a freelance cartoonist from Thailand.