GreenPeace Brazil Makes the Climate Crisis Playable in LosSantos+3°C
LosSantos+3°C is a 2022 integrated campaign by GreenPeace Brazil and VMLY&R Brasil in which the virtual city of Los Santos from Grand Theft Auto was modified to simulate the physical, social, and economic consequences of a world approximately three degrees Celsius warmer, directing players to a real-world petition and donation hotsite.
Greenpeace Brazil launched the campaign in February 2022, activating the modified map on the Kings Roleplay server between February 22nd and 25th, as documented by Ads of the World and reported by The Drum. The intervention transformed Los Santos — the most recognised city in the gaming universe — into a landscape defined by flooded districts, dry reservoirs, toxic air pollution, collapsed biodiversity, and populations displaced as climate refugees. Characters were required to wear masks, experienced reduced stamina, and were assigned unique missions including rescuing climate refugees and transporting clean water to communities in crisis. The mechanics were not cosmetic; every gameplay constraint was engineered to mirror a specific, documented consequence of the climate crisis.
In Brazil, the campaign carried a precise political objective alongside its environmental awareness mandate. Players who completed missions were directed to a dedicated hotsite where they could sign Greenpeace's petition calling on Brazilian state governors to formally declare a climate emergency. The hotsite also enabled direct donations to the organisation. By routing activist intent through one of the most-played gaming environments in the world, GreenPeace Brazil made the climate emergency tangible at the scale and in the language of a generation that spends more hours in virtual cities than in civic spaces. The campaign was submitted to Clapboard by PR professional Carolina Cesario of VML Brasil and earns a Clapboard Score of 77/100 — recognising its structural originality and cross-platform advocacy mechanics.
GreenPeace Brazil identified the Grand Theft Auto online roleplay community as one of the highest-concentration, hardest-to-reach activist audiences in the country. The Kings Roleplay server, where the LosSantos+3°C mod was hosted, represents a form of immersive social gaming where players invest sustained attention over extended sessions — a media environment that conventional public service advertising cannot purchase. By modifying the server environment itself rather than placing an ad within it, VMLY&R Brasil reframed environmental awareness as lived gameplay rather than interruption.
The strategic insight rests on a documented tension in climate communication: abstract statistics about global temperature increases consistently underperform emotionally compared with concrete, embodied experience, a dynamic explored extensively in climate psychology literature. By forcing players to wear masks because of air pollution, to tire faster in a degraded biosphere, and to spend their in-game labour rescuing refugees rather than accumulating wealth, the campaign translated a 3°C temperature increase from a scientific projection into a felt consequence. This approach positions LosSantos+3°C as a direct counterpoint to competitors in the attention economy — including commercially funded gaming activations by brands such as Nike and Burger King — who use virtual environments to build brand desire rather than civic urgency.
In Brazil, the climate stakes that framed the campaign were not hypothetical. The country has experienced escalating extreme weather events, and Greenpeace has consistently documented the connection between deforestation in the Amazon and disrupted rainfall patterns across South America. According to reporting by The Drum, the campaign explicitly targeted Brazilian state governors, using the petition mechanism to convert gaming engagement into political pressure. The choice of a roleplay server rather than a standard GTA Online lobby was also deliberate: roleplay communities self-police immersion, meaning players engage with the modified environment on its own terms rather than treating it as a novelty to be circumvented.
VMLY&R Brasil built LosSantos+3°C as a technically and narratively coherent world rather than a branded overlay. Rafael Pitanguy served as Chief Creative Officer at VMLY&R, with Beto Rogoski and Jeferson Rocha as Executive Creative Directors, as documented by sources including Latinspots and the Gerety Awards. Creative direction was shared across Guilherme Aché, Denon Oliveira, and Frederico Teixeira, with copywriting by Igor Pontes, Lucas Veloso, and Yuri Facioli, and art direction by Felipe Paganoti and Thiago Dias Bhering — a team whose depth reflects the technical ambiguity of the project, which sits at the intersection of game design, environmental communication, and political campaigning.
Director Marcelo Raimondi oversaw the campaign's film and video components, as noted in credits documented by Latinspots. Game server production and modification was handled by KingsRoleplay, with production companies Produka and the VMLY&R team executing the broader integrated build. The decision to work with KingsRoleplay as a production partner was structurally significant: it gave the campaign authentic access to an existing community and its technical infrastructure, lending the modified environment legitimacy that a purpose-built branded server could not have replicated.
The environmental design of the modified Los Santos map required each climate impact — flooding, reservoir depletion, air quality degradation, fauna and flora collapse — to be expressed through game mechanics rather than static imagery. Flooded areas were navigable differently. Pollution imposed stamina penalties. Mission structures were rewritten to replace accumulation-based objectives with survival and humanitarian tasks. As reported by The Drum, journalist Amy Houston described the work as Greenpeace effectively hijacking GTA to communicate climate disaster, a characterisation that captures both the creative audacity and the earned media framing the execution generated. The campaign's integrated classification reflects the convergence of gaming intervention, digital petition infrastructure, film content, and political advocacy into a single coherent system.
LosSantos+3°C produced measurable civic outcomes within the four-day activation window. According to sources including Campaignsoftheworld.com and Branding News, petition signatures for Greenpeace Brazil's climate emergency declaration increased by 340% during the campaign period. Donations to the organisation increased by 40%, according to the same sources. These figures are significant not merely as conversion metrics but as indicators that the gaming environment functioned as a genuine advocacy channel rather than a brand awareness exercise.
According to reporting by The Drum and coverage documented by Ads of the World, the campaign generated almost 30 million media impressions, a figure that reflects both the earned media value of the GTA hijack narrative and the novelty of gaming activism at this scale in the Brazilian market. The Drum selected the campaign for its Ads of the Week feature on March 2, 2022, as documented by The Drum's own editorial record, underscoring the international creative attention the work attracted beyond Brazil.
No verified long-term electoral or legislative outcomes — such as the formal declaration of a climate emergency by Brazilian state governors — are publicly documented as direct results of this campaign. What the data does confirm is that a four-day modification of a private gaming server, executed with a production budget incommensurate with the reach achieved, created a replicable model for gaming activism as a mainstream tactic in climate communication. The structural effectiveness of LosSantos+3°C lies in its conversion architecture: every gameplay experience pointed toward a real-world action, and the petition spike confirms that the architecture worked.
LosSantos+3°C is a February 2022 campaign by GreenPeace Brazil and VMLY&R Brasil that modified the Grand Theft Auto city of Los Santos to simulate a world three degrees Celsius warmer. Players experienced flooding, pollution, and climate refugee missions, then were directed to sign a petition calling on Brazilian state governors to declare a climate emergency.
VMLY&R Brasil, part of the WPP network and based in São Paulo, created LosSantos+3°C for GreenPeace Brazil. Chief Creative Officer Rafael Pitanguy led the team, alongside Executive Creative Directors Beto Rogoski and Jeferson Rocha, as documented by Latinspots and the Gerety Awards. The Kings Roleplay server handled game production and hosting.
VMLY&R Brasil modified the Kings Roleplay server environment between February 22nd and 25th, 2022. Los Santos was rebuilt to reflect climate crisis consequences: flooded zones, dry reservoirs, air pollution penalties, and missions requiring players to rescue climate refugees and transport clean water, according to Ads of the World and The Drum.
According to Campaignsoftheworld.com and Branding.news, petition signatures for Greenpeace Brazil's climate emergency declaration rose by 340% and donations increased by 40% during the campaign. The Drum reported the campaign generated almost 30 million media impressions, and The Drum named it one of its Ads of the Week in March 2022.
GreenPeace Brazil and VMLY&R Brasil targeted the Kings Roleplay GTA community because immersive roleplay sessions hold player attention that conventional public service advertising cannot reach. Embedding climate crisis consequences directly into gameplay mechanics — stamina loss, mask requirements, refugee missions — transformed abstract environmental data into embodied experience for a hard-to-reach audience in Brazil.
LosSantos+3°C was published in Brazil in February 2022 and ran on the Kings Roleplay server from February 22nd to 25th. The campaign is archived on Clapboard.com and has been covered by Ads of the World, The Drum, Campaignsoftheworld.com, Branding.news, and Latinspots, making it one of the more extensively documented gaming activism campaigns of that year.
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