Here’s an honour few agencies will ever be given: former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore, and The Climate Reality Project have asked GPY&R Sydney to work on their global campaign.

The aim is to use the voices of everyday people to put pressure on world leaders to commit to meaningful carbon emission reductions.

Five WPP agencies throughout the world had been invited by WPP group planning director, Jon Steel, and worldwide creative director, John O’Keeffe, to present their response to the brief.

The GPY&R Sydney team presented the campaign to Mr. Gore and his team at The Climate Reality Project, as well as the Climate Change and Communications Groups at the United Nations.

Its team is led by GPY&R Sydney managing director, Andrew Dowling;  strategic planning director, Lucielle Vardy; its two new executive creative directors, Bart Pawlak and David Joubert, and Y&R New York client services director, David Sharrod.

“It’s not every day you come to work and present to the likes of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore about a campaign that can make a real difference in the world. To say we are excited is an understatement,” Bart Pawlak, stated.

The successful campaign created by GPY&R and the WPP agencies will be active in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Philippines, South Africa and the USA.

It urges people to ask their leaders two important questions to make a positive difference for the future of the planet: ‘Why?’ and ‘Why Not?’

“In any language across the world, children ask why and why not from a very young age, over and over again. They ask the first to try to understand the world, and the second when they want to change that world.

“We want people of all ages to continue to ask these questions of their elected representatives to help highlight the problem in the current approach to climate change, and the future solutions we should be sanctioning now,” Andrew Dowling explained.

The creative will appear digitally in Australia, Brazil, India, Philippines, South Africa and the USA, with some executions tailored to individual nations.

The campaign invites children from around the world to represent their generation in a video. Those who create the six best submissions will be flown to New York to attend the Climate Summit on 23rd September and be part of a multimedia presentation to world leaders calling for action and ambition on climate change.

“We wanted to give the younger generation a voice in this debate. It will be our children and grandchildren who will see the most extreme effects of our leaders’ inaction on climate change, yet they have no voice in the legislative process and the most to lose if we do not act quickly and decisively,” said David Joubert, GPY&R

PR agency, PPR Australia, has been appointed as the lead agency to support the global launch and rollout of the campaign.

Richard Lazar, managing director of PPR, stated, “This campaign is hard-hitting and emotive and we’re really excited to have been asked to manage this global activation and launch from Australia. In line with the digital focus of the wider communications campaign, we’ll be using our new unique video distribution platform, Point Shoot Send (PSS), to distribute the campaign launch content, featuring Mr. Gore, to the global media.”

The multidisciplinary campaign will be delivered by eight individual WPP agencies and affiliates from different parts of the world and various disciplines – strategic planning, advertising, media investment management, digital communications, public relations & public affairs and youth marketing.

The agencies are: GPY&R Sydney; JWT; Maxus; The Futures Company; PPR Australia;The Glover Park Group; Blue State Digital; and affiliate company VICE.

Jon Steel, group planning director at WPP said, “We are delighted to be able to work with Mr. Gore in addressing the most important issue facing our planet. Our aim is to frame the problem in a simple, personal way, and to convince people that we cannot leave this to future generations to solve. Climate change is already affecting millions of people, and I, for one, don’t ever want to look my children and grandchildren in the eye and admit that I knew, and did nothing. Unlike most previous campaigns, ours has an optimistic tone.

“The majority of people want to solve this problem, but don’t know how. The ‘Why Not?’ part of our campaign suggests how it can be done.”

The campaign will continue to build momentum in the lead up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 21st Conference of the Parties in Paris in December 2015, with the aim of creating overwhelming public support for a global agreement on greenhouse gas reductions and climate action.