Białowieża Forest is the last primeval forest in Europe. Home to a unique ecology, the forest is protected as a national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, around 150,000 acres of the forest sits outside that protective status. Almost half of the trees in the entire forest are dead, eaten away by infestation from an insect called the spruce bark beetle. This infestation was used by the Polish government as justification to log down the forest on the edges of the UNESCO-protected area. Despite a court order from the European Court of Justice, and pressure from activist groups such as Greenpeace, the logging continued for well over a year. The debate around the topic quickly turned to become a political issue and negotiations with public were stuck in a deadlock. Seemed like Białowieża was already doomed to extinction. Nobody wanted to listen to each other.  So whom would the government listen to if they neglected opinion of scientists, NGOs or even their friends? There’s only one group – their future voters.

Our strategy laid in the truth that young people have more political influence than they are given credit for, and educating them can create real change. Especially, that (as not many people realize) there’s no age limit for signing a petition. The problem was that teens in Poland are completely not interested in political issues that Białowieża Forest became, moreover, many of them were not even aware where it is and how unique it is.

That’s why we decided to utilise Minecraft – a computer game that allows users to explore and build upon a 3D virtual landscape – to begin this process of education, building a scale custom map of the Bialowieza Forest in the cult digital world.

We recreated the forest as a 1:1 scale Minecraft map, featuring 7 million trees made of 50 million blocks. The gaming community loved it and it was used in schools and art installations.

The map provided a platform to launch 360 Facebook ads, a photography exhibition and a documentary film. Back online, teenagers played in the map during the school holidays, before the campaign climax saw one of Poland's most popular influencers, Gimper, live stream his experience of the digital forest on gaming site Twitch.

More than 10,000 people were watching live when he arrived at the scene and saw that every tree in the landscape had been digitally cut down. We took Białowieża, which they already got to know and loved, away. This helped young people to realize the importance of what is happening in real life. And to take action.

Result? 170 000 petitions signed, over 100 000 million people reached, environment minister dismissed.