Charting the state of British nature

Since 2013, the State of Nature partnership has brought together over 70 conservation and research organisations to produce regular reviews of how the UK’s biodiversity is faring. Working closely with one partner, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the largest nature conservation charity in the UK, we helped to produce the 2019 report for the UK and its constituent countries. In the current climate, with environmental issues of increasing concern, this report was as timely as ever.

A range of views

The challenge

The State of Nature Report is the result of a partnership of more than 70 organisations involved in the recording, researching and conservation of nature in the UK and its Overseas Territories. These include a broad spectrum of societies and research organisations with wide-ranging expertise, including our best- and least-known wildlife; conservation charities that take action for all elements of our wildlife and habitats; and the governmental nature conservation bodies for each of the four countries of the UK.

Making the complex accessible

The process

Flag worked with the RSPB to produce the State of Nature 2019 report, which also included a summary and was accompanied by individual reports for each country. In addition, we created social media posts that helped the report have a wide-ranging impact, with national television coverage (the BBC and Channel 4) and a front-page article in The Guardian.

One of the main challenges of a report that must be informative but also appealing is the sheer quantity of data. We worked with the RSPB to ensure that the State of Nature 2019 report conveyed all the required information, presented to make it as accessible as possible.

As the report and its country-specific elements were essentially designed to tell the same story to different audiences, at differing levels of detail, it was a challenge to combine attractive design with the right level of detail. For example, the main report, designed for an audience of conservation experts, contained over 100 complex graphs.

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Message for our times

The solution

Flag’s skilled design and artwork teams created impactful, meaningful, eye-catching and accessible visualisations of complex data on species decline and other impacts to biodiversity in the UK and its territories. We were able to help the RSPB produce its latest State of Nature suite of reports, converting the complex into appealing and meaningful content that was able to tell the same story to a variety of audiences.

“ Flag were a pleasure to work with: they had a real understanding of what we were trying to achieve with the report, and brought great ideas of their own to the project as well as translating our content into a wonderful set of reports. The impact that State of Nature 2019 has had in shaping public and government thinking on the biodiversity crisis is in no small way due to Flag’s help.””

Dr Mark Eaton Principal Conservation Scientist, RSPB

Get the State of Nature 2019 report

What we did

Creative and concept design
Creative development and branding
Print design and artwork
Production and project management

About the RSPB

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is a charitable organisation registered in England and Wales and in Scotland, founded in 1889. It works to promote conservation and protection of birds and the wider environment through public awareness campaigns, petitions and through the operation of nature reserves throughout the United Kingdom. For more information, visit the RSPB website.