Comment | As Cop30 opens in Brazil, it is time for the art world to embrace ethics with aesthetics – The Art Newspaper

At last, culture is on the official COP30 agenda. Thanks in great part to the Amazonian activist group Labverde and the environmental artist-activists Art of Change 21, during the United Nations Climate Change Conference until 21 November, there will be both an intensive artists’ campaign on social media and a physical artist presence at the conference.

This year’s edition of COP is taking place in Belém, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon, making it especially appropriate that artistic activities on site predominantly take the form of interventions and performances by eight Brazilian and indigenous artists. These include works by the campaigning photographer and documentary filmmaker Christian Braga and the socio-environmental activist Beto Oliveira, who is foregrounding the audio-visual project A Margem do Rio (the riverbank).

COP30 also marks an unprecedented flurry of artist-led activities taking place in galleries and institutions across the UK—for while Belém may be on the other side of the globe, we are all in this together.

It feels particularly important to remember this fact now, as we mark ten years since the signing of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change at COP21, which set out the target limit of keeping global temperature rises below 1.5 degrees, given that this target has now almost certainly been breached. If any further proof were needed, the severity of Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica last month, together with the UK’s current, unseasonably warm November weather, underlines that urgent, international action has to be taken if the planet is to be habitable for future generations.

Warding off extinction

Another important tenth eco-anniversary is that of Remember Nature, Gustav Metzger’s visionary environmental art project. On 4 November 2015, the late, great artist called for a day of environmental action across the arts to create a mass movement that would ward off extinction. “This appeal is for the widest possible participation from the world of the arts…it is our privilege and our duty to be at the forefront of the struggle,” he declared at the time.

More than 140 artists and creatives—ranging from Judy Chicago and Rose Wylie to Olafur Eliasson and Marina Abramović—all responded to his rallying cry with their creative ideas on how to remember nature and shape a more ecological and equitable future. These multifarious proposals covered recipes, activism flowcharts, memorial plaques, direct action and much more, all of which were first shared via a website and now have been gathered into a book: 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, published by Penguin.

Exactly a decade later, on 4 November 2025, Remember Nature was ambitiously revisited and extended. Sixteen arts institutions across England, including Tate, Serpentine Galleries, FACT Liverpool, Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, KARST in Plymouth and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, all worked with artists to put on a range of day-long public projects that answered Metzger’s call to stand up for the planet.

Among these widely inclusive activities were artist-led walks, riverside performances and communal feasting. The Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio collaborated with the Turner Contemporary in Margate and local primary schoolchildren to plant an apple orchard of more than 30 species in Kent. Meanwhile in Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Cornelia Parker created an installation based on the hopes and dreams of a further 800 schoolchildren.

Among the original contributors to Metzger’s 2015 initiative was Cooking Sections (the artist duo of Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), who back then had just begun their exploration of the relationship between food and the climate crisis. A decade later, their projects now stretch deep and wide into communities across the globe, whether offering financially and environmentally viable alternatives to salmon farming in Scotland, archiving drought-resistant seeds for farmers in Italy, or working to maintain the livelihoods of buffalo herders outside Istanbul.

It was especially inspiring for me to mark Metzger’s Remember Nature through an in-conversation with Cooking Sections at Hauser & Wirth’s west London farm shop, where they explained to me and an enthusiastic audience how they are harnessing the power of art to achieve actionable, environmentally beneficial outcomes that extend way beyond the art world. Ten years on, Metzger’s vision has renewed relevance, and seeing how it continues to be honoured offered an appropriate and timely pointer to what heads of state should be grappling with in Brazil.

Is it easy being green?

Elsewhere, pre-COP awareness of the climate and ecological crisis has had more revving up via a high-profile public poster campaign: 16 specially commissioned works that have been prominently plastered across thousands of advertising billboards throughout the UK and Brazil since early October. Part of the British Council’s UK/Brazil Season of Culture, and produced in association with public art producers Artichoke, the posters include new works by Ackroyd & Harvey, Yinka Shonibare, Olinda Tupinambá and Deepak Kathait. They respond, in myriad ways, to the climate crisis under the collective theme of It’s Not Easy Being Green.

This is a slogan which still sadly strikes a sympathetic chord throughout our sector, and indeed most others, with many attempts to respond to the climate and ecological crisis hampered by the political instability and financial precarity that characterises our troubled times. All of which makes it especially remarkable that, even in such an inclement context, London’s leading institutions and art galleries have come together to form a collective climate action initiative that coincides with COP30.

London Art+Climate Week, which has been instigated by the Gallery Climate Coalition (of which I am a founding member) in partnership with the gowithYamo app, runs from 12-16 November and boasts more than 25 participants, both public and commercial. Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican and Tates Modern and Britain, alongside Arcade, Bow Arts and Kate MacGarry gallery and organisations such as Christie’s and Crozier, will all combine to mount an extensive, free public programme of exhibitions and events focused around climate and the environment. Panel discussions, workshops, film screenings, performances and a range of activities have all been designed to complement the plethora of environmentally themed shows currently taking place in spaces large and small across all parts of the city.

Directly and obliquely, these cover a wide range of ecological concerns. At Sam Smith, Sarah Miska’s paintings will explore the British tradition of hunting, while at South London Gallery Yto Barrada’s will present an installation of new sustainably produced textile pieces, and in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, Máret Ánne Sara’s epic commission revolving around Sámi reindeer herding culture remains on show. In addition, there are artistic examinations of Welsh slate quarries and London’s forgotten rivers at Hypha Studios in east London, and more work around the subject of threatened landscapes at Cristea Roberts in the West End, to name just a few.

It is hoped that this new example of sector unity will become an annual event to complement COP, and to show how the arts industry can, in the spirit of Metzger, “follow the path of ethics in aesthetics”. As global leaders gather in Brazil to review the hitherto unsatisfactory progress towards international climate targets, let us hope that each and all of these initiatives demonstrates how the arts can contribute to climate awareness and, in doing so, can make it clear that it is, after all, not quite so hard to be green.