Heritage & Hope

A hush falls over the hall. A young Pacific Island mother stepped on the podium, her traditional dress out of place against the rest of the suits. She puts her daughter to bed, closing her eyes and recites a poem to her that pleads with her land. At that point, policy disappears, and emotion comes up. Such scenes are now characteristic of COPs, where in addition to negotiations, art and storytelling make climate debate human through light installations, poetry, dance and protest, creativity has been used as a strong tool of climate justice. 

A Forest Grows from Heartbeats 

During the opening night of COP21 in Paris, one of the most recognizable monuments of the world was covered with virtual life. The Eiffel tower also lit up in green as it served as a canvas to the project 1 Heart 1 tree a monumental light installation by the artist Naziha Mestaoui. Using a smart phone application, the world could effectively plant a virtual tree on the tower, which was illuminated and grew in time to the beat of the user. An actual tree would be planted in reforestation efforts in various countries later behalf of every single digital tree. The skyline in Paris was turned into a living forest of light with each pulse a commitment to the planet. Art brought some means to unite and lift in an otherwise sombre city that had been struck down by the recent tragedy and high security. The glitter of the trees of the Eiffel Tower gave an encouraging signal that the heartbeat and the action of everyone will help in the climate fight. The installation combined technology with poetry that linked the hearts to the trees and reminded the COP21 delegates of what the talks were all about and that was to ensure that the planet was alive in the faces of generations to come. 

Breathing the Crisis: Pollution Pods and Visceral Truth 

Then three years later, at COP25 in Madrid, world leaders and avidly watching eyes were welcomed to make an entirely different kind of journey the one that passed directly through the lung cancer of our cities. The installation by the British artist Michael Pinsky, titled Pollution Pods, was a ring of geodesic domes all interconnected and simulating the air quality, smell, and haze of various urban settings. You would feel like coughing in the suffocating air of New Delhi or Beijing, before heading out to the cool air of a Norwegian fjord an immersive shock to the senses. It is a viscerally powerful installation that was literally pitched into the COP25 summit halls to create a push to compel world leaders to literally breathe the crisis that they were talking about. The World Health Organization and people campaigning against climate change asked negotiators to walk into the pods and experience how their eyes and lungs burn in a few harrowing moments of an everyday life of a million people who have no air to breathe. Pinsky made the Pollution Pods to determine whether art can alter attitudes and inspire action and emphasized that it is the same fossil power that warms the earth that is also polluting our air. The pods are traveling to the decision-makers as explained by Pinsky, and they are reaching out to initiate a conversation. And it was difficult to ignore the message, as delegates poured out of every dome gagging, the abstract concept of climate change was painfully real. Within a couple of minutes art had done what statistics tends to fail to cut through intellectual distance and deliver an emotional blow. 

Pollution Pods by Michael Pinsky at COP 

Traditions That Refuse to Disappear 

Not all the persuasive messages at COP25 were said in words or high-tech installations, some of them were danced, sang and wore. A small team of Rapa Nui representatives of the Easter Island came to Madrid in full ancestral attire. They danced in the sterile halls, in full fervour, performing traditional Polynesian dances which were stunning to behold. Their message was obvious: they wanted to send a strong message to these nations that gathers to show them that once the climate change is not stopped and controlled, their whole culture will be lost there on a deserted island. The view of feathered suits and the singing of old songs in the core of a modern conference was the shocking and touching contrast. It was demonstration by cultural pride: a protest that there are actual people behind every emission statistic struggling to survive. 

The indigenous people all over the world have increasingly come to be felt in COPs through art and narration. You could find yourself in the corridors and pavilions surrounded by a group of Amazonian elders singing a song of the forest or Andean women who showcased their hand-woven textile that represented the changing season and sacred locations. The Song, Dance and Craft During the events of COP25 in the Indigenous Peoples Pavilion, the leaders shared their knowledge and grief through song, dance and craft. Among other impressive murals in Madrid, was one which depicted the face of a Peruvian native leader, Hilda Perez, with the Earth forming the iris of her eye, representing the emergency values of the conference.  

One of the organizers said that time is short and it is necessary to consider all the tools of our toolkit as such art plays a leading role in education and awareness. Textile weavings and oral stories have been known to preserve truth in the dark times in indigenous traditions. This legacy was turned into a climate testimonial at the COP25. The emotional reality which every dance, every stitch bore, was that nothing in policy paper could have expressed: a wake-up call that the climate crisis is not only threatening whole ways of life, but that the few who had done the least to create it were incurring the most costs. Through their music in the halls of COP, indigenous artists and activists made their voice heard in a very strong moral way which is that they needed the leaders not only to listen to the facts but also to feel the liability. 

Poetry and Storytelling: Voices that Move the Heart 

Poetry and storytelling have become a breath of fresh air to the heart of the matter in an environment that can be overpoweringly technical in language. No one did it as much as Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a young poet of the Marshall Islands. First, she attracted international attention upon appearing before a UN climate conference and playing a composition dedicated to her baby daughter, promising to save her native island with rising sea levels. Electric was its effect on the rising delegates, most of whom were very much moved. In COP21 in Paris, Jetnil-Kijiner was among poets of the Pacific Island to keep that legacy of telling the truth about speaking through art and demonstrates that the personal is much more than the political. The lost homeland in her verses played a personal role and became tangible, not merely an economic prophecy. In his role as a writer-activist Bill McKibben observed, the most difficult fact to communicate about climate change is also the easiest one, that we are on a planet, and that planet is breaking. And poets, it happens, could put across that message. They give it in the language of metaphor and memory that appeals to the souls of people. 

Others including Jetnil-Kijiner have written about the experience of seeing the ancestral atoll being drowned by the advancing waves. McKibben wrote of one such collaboration between a Greenlandic poet and Jetnil-Kijiner "the destruction of the one homeland is the destruction of the other being the unavoidable consequence of its being made up of the other. 

These poetic visuals shown in climate summits and protests deprive distance. It reminds all of us of the fact that there are actual families behind such words as adaptation and mitigation and who are frightened about their houses. Spoken word and music were common within the youth and activists of COP26 in Glasgow to express frustration and hope. Out of the wild shoutings of We are not drowning, we are fighting! to the soul-felt contributions of youth on the Pacific side, to the artistic expressions of side-vents, a moral significance attached itself with which, through a reverberation, frequently bursting out of the conference walls. 

How Stories Can Make People Care About Climate 

What used to be a peripheral aspect of climate conferences has over the years emerged to be a dynamic movement. Art is no longer a decoration at COPs it is a part of climate talk, driving it forward. The narrators, artists and actors of such summits are the conscience of the process, and they remind leaders just why any of it is important in the first place. Whereas policy negotiation may be tardy and abstract, works of art operate on a different time and frequency it directly appeals to the soul and can create change in this very moment. According to activist Kumi Naidoo, politics will never stop this crisis: we need to involve culture and emotion. He thinks that culture makes politics and society rather than vice versa, citing how songs, art and drama empowered people that took part in struggles such as the apartheid in South Africa. 

Each year, the space for art at COP seems to expand. From community murals and youth art displays to official UNFCCC initiatives embracing creative voices, the climate conversation is evolving to include the artists alongside the scientists. As the climate crisis accelerates, so does a global chorus of painters, poets, dancers, and dreamers rise at events like COP. They carry the memories of their ancestors and the hopes of the young. In the end, the most enduring image of a climate summit may not be a signed document, but a story that forever changes someone’s perspective. Policy may chart the course, but story lights the way straight into our hearts, where true change is born. 

The climate movement’s power multiplies when it harnesses creativity.