A new batch of emojis has landed on phones worldwide – and one stands out as a stark environmental warning. Among eight new symbols now available in messaging apps is a bare, lifeless tree that sits awkwardly among its leafy green neighbours.
It's not just a design choice: it's a symbol of how the climate crisis is reshaping the planet.
“The climate is changing, droughts are becoming more frequent and more severe,” said Brian Baihaki, the designer behind the new emoji.
“Trees have adapted in different ways to survive these droughts – for example by losing their leaves to conserve water.”
Baihaki first submitted the idea in May 2022 to the Unicode Consortium – the international group that decides which emojis get added to keyboards everywhere. It took almost three years and a strict selection process before the dead tree finally made it to screens.
From ornitherapy to kissing trees, how can nature benefit human health?
Steep competition
Each year, hundreds of emoji proposals are sent in. Most are turned down. To be approved, a symbol has to be usable across different cultures, languages and situations. Local foods, religious icons or region-specific objects rarely make it through.
“The criteria is strict. Emojis have to be able to carry more than one meaning and be usable worldwide,” explained journalist David Groison, author of La Révolution Emoji, a graphic novel about emoji culture.
Groison has made several attempts to get a wind turbine emoji accepted – always without success, and without explanation.
The dead tree, though, ticked all the right boxes.
It can stand for winter, wildfires, sickness or sadness. And it's a search term people actually use. “Dead tree”, Baihaki pointed out, appears in more than twice as many online search results as the word “deciduous”.
In his application, he wrote: “This emoji is likely to be widely used because it represents prolonged droughts, which are becoming increasingly common.”
The Kenyan engineer building a sustainable future with recycled plastic bricks
Warming planet
That warning now feels urgent. The year 2024 was officially the hottest ever recorded. It brought extreme droughts to many parts of the world, especially Africa.
A UN report published in December warned that, unless our habits and systems change fast, drought could affect 75 percent of the global population by 2050.
Even worse, arid land has already spread by 4.3 million square kilometres in just 30 years. Drylands now cover 40 percent of the planet’s surface.
Two billion people already live in these dry zones – and that number could rise to 5 billion before the end of the century.
While droughts can come and go, aridity is permanent. It’s a shift that leaves soil exhausted and water scarce.
Do celebrity climate warriors amplify the message or embody the problem?
How emojis can help
But can a tiny image on a screen really change how people think? Perhaps. Three Italian researchers writing in the journal iScience last year said emojis could be a useful tool for raising environmental awareness.
“Emojis can be used to encourage public support for conservation efforts, to stress the urgency of protecting endangered species and to prompt people to take part in biodiversity events,” they wrote.
In 2021, the World Wildlife Fund worked with tech companies to mark World Wildlife Day using emojis to draw attention to the extinction of species.
For Belgian psychiatrist Daniel Desmedt, emojis do something deeper – they restore emotion to dry, digital messages.
“Back when people wrote letters by hand, there was the texture of the paper, the physical presence of the letter, the author’s unique handwriting – all sorts of details that could carry their personality and possibly even their emotion,” Desmedt said.
“With SMS, we’d lost some of that. Emojis bring feeling back into communication. They can express emotion more clearly.”
Desmedt believes the dead tree emoji will stand out. “The dead tree will trip us up. It won’t let us feel calm. There’s something disturbing about it – something that speaks to us on another level,” he said.
How weird fossils created by human garbage may baffle future civilisations
Eco-anxiety symbol
Stefano Mammola, one of the researchers behind the iScience study, said the emoji could help get people talking about big environmental issues.
“It could contribute to facilitating discussions and raising awareness about important topics in ecology and conservation, such as the climate crisis and the global loss of biodiversity,” he added.
But that will only work if people use it.
Right now, there are about 3,790 emojis available. Some – like the crying-laughing face – are everywhere. Others vanish quickly. The eye-in-speech-bubble emoji, launched in 2015 to signal anti-bullying efforts, was barely used and quickly forgotten.
“The dead tree will probably end up being used in ways we can't imagine right now. It will depend on which other emojis it gets combined with,” Groison said.
One of the other new emojis released alongside the dead tree is a weary-looking face with dark circles under the eyes. It's meant to represent the exhaustion many feel in today's world.
Used together, they could become a visual shorthand for eco-anxiety – the emotional fallout of a planet in crisis.
This article was adapted from the original version in French by RFI's François-Damien Bourgery
