By: Dr. Saira Iqbal
World Art Day arrives each year as a celebration of human creativity, yet in the contemporary moment it also demands a deeper reading: art is no longer only about aesthetic pleasure, but increasingly a way of sensing and surviving a changing planet.
We live in an age where climate change is no longer an abstract scientific forecast but a lived emotional condition. Heatwaves that linger longer than memory, floods that return with increasing frequency, shrinking green spaces, polluted air, and disrupted seasonal rhythms are reshaping not only our environment but also our inner worlds. In this context, art becomes more than expression; it becomes an archive of ecological feeling.
Environmental change is also an emotional change. The concept of emotional ecology helps us understand how shifting landscapes reshape human affect our grief, anxiety, nostalgia, and even imagination. When rivers dry up or trees disappear from familiar surroundings, something within human memory also begins to erode, and this erosion often finds expression in cultural and ritual forms. In regions like Cholistan, for instance, communities respond to prolonged drought through devotional songs that mourn ecological loss and plead for rain. These songs become a way of translating environmental distress into shared emotional language. Art steps into this space of loss and transformation.
In regions like Punjab, where seasonal rhythms once structured rural life, these ecological shifts are deeply felt. Winters seem shorter, summers more intense, and rainfall increasingly unpredictable. These are not merely meteorological changes; they are cultural disruptions. Traditional artistic forms such as folk songs, embroidery patterns, oral storytelling, and miniature painting have long been tied to landscape and seasonality. As these ecological markers shift, so too does the emotional vocabulary embed in cultural expression.
Across the world, artists are increasingly acting as climate witnesses. They translate data into emotion, statistics into narrative, and environmental loss into sensory experience. This is important because climate change is not only a scientific crisis but also a crisis of imagination. Without emotional engagement, environmental data remains distant and abstract. Art bridges this gap by making ecological change visible, felt, and remembered.
We are witnessing the emergence of what can be called climate aesthetics, forms of art that carry ecological urgency within their structure. Whether through public installations made from recycled materials, eco-murals in urban spaces, or digital storytelling projects that document disappearing landscapes, art is increasingly becoming a language of environmental awareness and responsibility.
World Art Day, therefore, should not be reduced to exhibitions or ceremonial events. It offers an opportunity to rethink how art can participate in ecological consciousness. Schools, universities, and community spaces can transform this day into platforms for environmental storytelling. Workshops on climate and creativity, public art campaigns on water and waste conservation, and collaborative installations using recycled materials can shift art from display to dialogue.
At its core, art in the age of climate change is about care, care for landscapes, care for memory, and care for emotional survival. It asks us to slow down and notice what is disappearing, but also what can still be restored or reimagined. In a warming world, the most urgent role of art may not only be to represent beauty, but to remind us that the planet itself is a shared emotional space – fragile, changing, and deeply alive.
The writer is a distinguished scholar in environmental humanities and a novelist.
