This story is part of our Impact Stories series, spotlighting our fellows who, drawing on socially engaged arts, help communities across Europe confront past experiences, address present challenges, and imagine new futures. Here, Lewis reflects on how culture and creativity can unlock new pathways to climate action.
I spent years as a musician and climate change activist without these two parts of my identity interacting at all. But I became convinced that the barriers to climate action were psychological, social, and cultural – all of which are domains that the arts can directly influence. Culture for Climate Scotland provided a unique platform to combine those two passions.
Culture for Climate Scotland works with culture to achieve transformational change towards a sustainable Scotland. We identify barriers that we think socially engaged arts can address — such as a lack of trust between communities and decision-makers — and collaborate with artists to design suitable creative interventions. For each project, we embed an artist in a community or local partner organisation, including cultural venues, community centres, or environmental groups. They then co-produce creative work – films, maps, drawings, posters, banners, prints and more – as a way to collectively align on what’s needed for the future of their local area.
Our projects leverage the full skillsets of artists to tackle barriers to climate action, and our approach responds directly to the communities we work with, meaning each project leads to different kinds of impact. One of our projects, Transforming Audience Travel Through Art, in Perth, looked to understand the barriers to sustainable travel, for example. We developed positive stories to counter negative attitudes towards public transport – including a choir flashmob that was covered by local press – and built connections between cultural venues and community transport groups to encourage future collaboration.
Another of our projects, Climate Beacons, helped develop new relationships between cultural and environmental organisations that are still going strong today. This project engaged over 18,000 people – from members of the public to environmental professionals – and was written into the Scottish Government’s Climate Change Public Engagement Strategy, which included a section on the role of arts, culture, and heritage. But even more important than these were the connections, skills, confidence, and greater sense of agency participants reported from the process.
Author Amitav Ghosh described climate change as a “crisis of the imagination.” My hope is that those with influence over climate and environmental decisions in Europe understand the enormous potential of imaginative power in battling climate action, and will exercise their imagination in giving the next generation a brighter future.
Explore more stories of socially engaged arts driving change across Europe. View the Stories of Impact map here.
