Artists are brilliant at holding complexity. Making meaning, making sense, building community around problems is their superpower.

So says Angharad Wynne-Jones of the role artists and creatives have in addressing the existential issue of our time: climate change. 

Wynne-Jones is a strategist and facilitator for Creative Climate, a new peak body formed with Creative Australia funding to help Australia’s arts and cultural sector tackle the climate crisis. 

“The appetite for this work is really palpable within the sector,” says Wynne-Jones. “Audiences are keen for cultural institutions and the cultural sector to make these changes. Artists are too.” 

Climate action in the cultural space isn’t new. Wynne-Jones points to UK-based Julie’s Bicycle and Culture for Climate Scotland as arts organisations formed in the last two decades to mobilise the industry against climate change, which provided guidance to Creative Climate. 

But Wynne-Jones says Creative Climate’s consortium model is its strength. Creative Climate consists – for now – of four climate-focused arts organisations: Green Music Australia, A Climate For Art, Centre for Reworlding and pvi collective. Fellow strategist and facilitator Catherine Jones and environmental consultant Matt Wicking round out the team. 

“It's helpful to have a group of people at different points in the sustainability journey with different expertise. It strengthens our offer and the connection between us and the sector.” 

That offer includes practical resources like a carbon calculator to help organisations measure emissions against Australian standards, housed on Creative Climate’s low-carbon website designed by Melbourne-based Hours After to minimise data and energy use. 

There are activities like Planting, a one-day community revegetation event in Melbourne on 7 September, run in collaboration with Landcare and Fed Square that will feature artist and First Nations-led workshops. 

Green Music Australia is also offering venues free slots to assess their environmental credentials through the Green Venue Certification Scheme. Expressions of interest close 19 August. 

Creative Climate’s work also includes advocacy, networking and testing ideas for what cultural practice might look like in a changing environment. 

“We’re interested in partnerships and what we can do collaboratively to mobilise across the sector, because that’s how we make the big systemic change to reduce emissions,” she says. 

In the short time since we’ve launched, lots of people and organisations are putting up their hands, wanting to engage.

Significantly, Creative Climate aims to centre First Nations knowledge in climate change response – something Wynne-Jones says the Australian cultural sector is uniquely placed to do. 

“We need to reimagine how we get behind the incredible First Nations knowledge of 65,000 continuous years of living on this beautiful country in balance with its systems and resources,” she says.  

“Nowhere else on the planet has that kind of possibility of connection to that depth of knowledge.” 

Claire G. Coleman, a Wirlomin-Noongar artist, writer and co-founder of the Centre for Reworlding, recently began a nine-month nationwide consultation with First Nations artists, elders and thinkers, with the plan to then co-design an Indigenous-led Knowledge Keepers circle that advises Creative Climate. 

“I don’t think it’s right to do a project like Creative Climate without an Indigenous knowledge circle involved in some way,” says Coleman.  

Indigenous people have survived multiple climate change events over tens of thousand years on this continent, and managed to maintain the continent with a fairly stable population for tens of thousands of years until colonisation began. It’s not much of a stretch to say that Aboriginal knowledge systems should contain the information required to mitigate and survive this next climate change.

At Coleman’s first consultation at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair in July, she heard firsthand how Indigenous communities are being impacted by extreme climate events. 

“There’s a genre of Aboriginal story that tells people how to identify when a food source is available. It might be when you see a certain flower flowering, it means a certain fish has come closer to shore. Torres Strait and Aboriginal people have these sorts of stories all through Australia. I keep hearing about how things are happening in the wrong order. Systems that have been effective in helping people to survive a harsh landscape for tens of thousands of years are starting to fall down.” 

Coleman is also keenly aware that there’s trepidation about how an Indigenous knowledge circle will work. 

“I’ve seen Indigenous knowledge circles or advisory councils be very ineffectual. The problem is always that the systems and structures used to do it are never themselves Indigenous-led. The knowledge circle may be Indigenous-led, but the process to develop it is not,” Coleman says. 

“So I’m co-designing this with the elders and artists who are interested in the issue so that maybe this time there can be no failings with Indigenous protocols in how the whole thing operates.” 

Next stop for Coleman is Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair in August, where she hopes more conversations among the large gathering will inform the co-design. 

Wynne-Jones also acknowledges that arts workers too often operate in survival mode under intense pressure. 

“No one’s ever been at this level of existential risk planetarily that we’re at,” she says. 

“So it’s critical to find joyful energy within and with partners because it’s a big task and to do it joyfully feels important to keep going in a way that’s mobilised and sustainable.” 

It’s a sentiment echoed by Coleman, who says climate action is not just about technological solutions, but sociopolitical ones – and artists are at the forefront of stepping bravely into uncomfortable places. 

“Nothing has a stronger impact on the sociopolitical space than art. To mitigate climate change society has to change, and it’s artists who we look to when society needs to change,” Coleman says.  

Art is a practice that holds space for the unknown. We need to accept that the unknown is there and intentionally engage with it, because not knowing what you’re doing is how you come up with novel solutions.

For more information on Creative Climate, its initiatives and getting involved visit www.creativeclimate.org.au