With a population of about 12,000, the nine islands of Tuvalu sit in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Australia. But for how much longer?

As a low-lying country, it is under severe threat from climate change and rising sea levels, which could see it become uninhabitable over the next century.

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To preserve the sovereignty of the nation, it turned to digital innovation and worked with Accenture Song. The resulting metaverse solution, “The First Digital Nation,” won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes Lions and has now picked up the main Innovation prize at the Gerety Awards.
All of the Grand Prix winners from Cannes Lions 2023

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Named after copywriter Frances Gerety, who coined the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” for De Beers, the 2023 awards are being announced here on Adweek. What makes the Gerety Awards unique is that they are judged by an all-female jury.

Tara Ford, chief creative officer for The Monkeys, which is part of Accenture Song, discussed how the Innovation Grand Prix-winning project came to be. The full list of winners follows this Q&A.

Adweek: Where did the project originate? What was the initial brief?

Tara Ford: The Government of Tuvalu came to us through mutual partners whom we worked with on other sustainability-related projects. Prior to this, Accenture had already worked with several Pacific islands, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and Amazon Web Services on a recent conservation and climate change project.

It was really humbling to hear first-hand from Minister Simon Kofe and his team about the challenges Tuvalu and its people are facing in the next five, 10 and 50 years.

He talked about how in a matter of decades, the low-lying Pacific nation will disappear due to rising sea levels. As an island nation with a maximum height of 4 meters (13 feet), they are in an extremely vulnerable position when it comes to the effects of climate change and sea level rises. No country has ever had to deal with this before. The loss of a nation due to climate change is an entirely new problem.

Tuvalu needed help with a plan to save the sovereignty of their nation, giving the government an ongoing framework and central entity from which Tuvalu can continue to communicate and serve their people—even if they are displaced.

They also needed to use that plan to capture the attention of governments and people across the globe, communicating the urgent need for climate action. Minister Kofe’s scheduled address at COP27 [the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference] provided the perfect opportunity to serve Tuvalu’s dual aims of being recognized as a digital nation, while also giving a crucial wake-up call to the world.