BY ABBAS NAZIL
Art is emerging as a powerful tool for making climate change more visible, personal and actionable, with creative projects across Asia-Pacific showing how artistic expression can deepen public awareness, strengthen community participation and bring overlooked environmental experiences into policy discussions.
The examples were presented during the first Art for Earth: Climate Creativity Lab 2026 webinar, organised by UNESCO, where six initiatives demonstrated how art can connect climate issues with people’s everyday experiences and encourage reflection, dialogue and collective action.
Among the projects featured was an eco-art exhibition by Lan Qixia of China, which transformed waste collected from mountains into 12 installations along a 2.5-kilometre trail.
Young people and community volunteers participated in designing and creating the installations, encouraging visitors to reconsider waste, environmental responsibility and their relationship with nature.
In the Republic of Korea, Yujin Joung presented *Sun as a New Currency*, a speculative fiction and collective world-building project examining inequalities associated with green transitions.
The project brought attention to perspectives that are often marginalised in climate discussions, including women and workers such as Jeju’s haenyeo, while offering alternative ways of understanding environmental change beyond conventional statistics and scientific data.
Another Korean project, *Decomposer* by Hanna Park, used video and discarded materials to challenge fixed perceptions and draw attention to ecological traces that are often overlooked.
From India, Sonali Verma and Pritish Bali presented *Making the “Invisible” Visible*, which combined thermal cameras with women’s voices to document the effects of extreme indoor heat on women engaged in unpaid domestic work.
The project highlighted a hidden and gendered dimension of climate change by showing how rising temperatures can affect people inside their homes and bringing those experiences into wider public and policy discussions.
Pubarun Basu’s *Dhara* trained young people along the Ganga-Yamuna river system to document ecological changes and community stories, helping frontline riverine communities create local archives and strengthen their ability to tell their own environmental stories.
Tanmay Shah’s *Borrowed Earth*, meanwhile, used painting and photography to portray heat, water stress and pollution in ways designed to generate emotional connections with environmental challenges.
During the panel discussion, participants stressed that art does not necessarily need to provide direct solutions to climate change.
Instead, its strength can lie in making environmental problems tangible, questioning established perspectives and creating spaces where people can reflect, participate and act.
The speakers noted that while scientific evidence remains essential to understanding climate change, data alone may not adequately communicate how environmental changes affect people’s homes, livelihoods and relationships with their surroundings.
Art can help bridge that gap through images, stories, materials and collaborative creative processes that turn abstract climate information into experiences that audiences can understand on a personal level.
The discussion also emphasised the importance of working with communities rather than simply portraying them as subjects.
Artists were encouraged to use participatory approaches that allow community members to document environmental changes themselves and become active narrators of their experiences.
The panelists acknowledged that meaningful collaboration requires time, trust and reciprocity, while artists must also remain aware of their own position when working with communities whose experiences differ from theirs.
Speakers further urged young artists to begin with specific environmental issues, places and lived experiences rather than attempting to address broad global climate concepts without understanding local realities.
They also encouraged long-term partnerships, community archives, youth training and grassroots networks that can continue creating value beyond individual exhibitions or artistic projects.
The webinar also recognised the environmental contradictions within climate-focused artistic practice, including travel, material use and the carbon footprint associated with exhibitions.
Rather than seeking claims of ethical perfection, participants encouraged artists to acknowledge these challenges openly and incorporate them into conversations about responsible creative practice.
UNESCO’s webinar ultimately demonstrated that art can contribute to climate action by making hidden experiences visible, strengthening community agency and creating new connections between people and their environments.
By combining creativity with sustained engagement at the local level, artistic initiatives can help transform climate change from a distant global issue into a lived reality that encourages reflection, dialogue and collective action.
