Sanjiv Gopal and Brikesh Singh
In Mumbai, stand-up comics now joke about air pollution in their sets. While the air quality outside remains “poor”, the audience in the theatre laughs. This is just one example that shows how climate change and culture are slowly becoming enmeshed.
Much of the climate conversation still sits within reports, technology pathways, finance frameworks and market signals. These are important in responding to climate challenges, but remain expert-heavy and distant, especially for people, communities, local leaders and governments This creates a gap between lived experience and how climate is formally discussed.
The conversation also requires relatable anchors that connect climate action to everyday experience.
Why does climate action often fail to connect with people’s lived realities and what role can culture play in bridging this gap?
Pop culture has always played a powerful role in social transitions. A phrase used, a joke shared, a story seen or a song heard; these shape how we see the world. Climate discourse is yet to actively travel through this cultural bloodstream.
Public health transitions were shaped not only by epidemiology but by communication and social norms. Sanitation, digital payments, tobacco reduction and financial inclusion have also depended on trust, messaging and shared narratives. Major societal shifts have had a cultural dimension.
Culture creates shared vocabulary that helps complex issues travel more easily.
Climate change often enters public discourse through the language of crisis or complexity. Sometimes, this creates distance, fatigue or worse still, cynicism and disengagement. The challenge is not so much about the lack of awareness but the lack of emotional connection. A scientific graph might tell us temperatures are rising while a song will tell us what that feels like. Both matter. Research increasingly shows that emotional engagement, storytelling and contextual narratives shape how people respond. Facts inform. Culture enables movement.
India’s climate story is deeply local and embedded in everyday experience. Heat stress affects school classrooms and outdoor workers long before it appears in policy documents and plans. In cities like Mumbai and Nagpur, outdoor workers are already adjusting shifts to avoid peak afternoon heat.
Air pollution is joked about in everyday conversations even while it shapes public health outcomes. Changing monsoon rhythms are discussed in farmer WhatsApp groups. Water scarcity is understood through lived memory rather than rainfall and aquifer charts. In all of these contexts, language, metaphors and stories matter.
A conversation on heat may travel differently through theatre than through technical language. Air pollution often resonates more through humour than statistics. Stories and songs allow climate anxiety to be expressed without technical vocabulary.
Pop culture does not simplify climate realities. It translates them, allowing climate to be felt, not just understood. In many ways, culture functions like behavioural public infrastructure; shaping what feels normal, possible and worth acting on.
Early explorations
Our work sits at the intersection of climate, governance and everyday decision-making, helping shape pathways that are equitable, economically sensible and grounded in reality. We work with governments, industry, academia, civil society and communities to translate evidence into implementation approaches that are locally rooted yet systemically relevant. Alongside this, we have been exploring how culture can expand the climate conversation.
The Climate Culture Collective is one such effort —a growing network of musicians, comedians, journalists and storytellers exploring ways to express climate complexity in accessible formats and narratives. Early explorations included Laughs Per Minute, which brought stand-up comics together to explore air pollution and climate anxieties through humour. Fever Dream, a theatre production, gently questions whether technological optimism alone can keep pace with the scale of the climate challenge. Culture Shift India is creating conversations with artists such as Ankur Tewari on how creative practice can bridge emotion and action. The evolving Climate Emergency Mixtape draws on multilingual rap traditions to create space for younger voices to express climate hope in ways that feel authentic.
Signals from elsewhere
Globally, similar approaches are emerging across cultural contexts. The Good Energy initiative works with writers and producers to integrate climate narratives into film and television storylines, helping mainstream entertainment engage with climate realities without becoming didactic. The Tempestry Project turns temperature data into knitted pieces, helping people experience climate change in a tangible way. Laboratório de Emergência in Brazil and the HEVA Fund in East Africa support artists, filmmakers and storytellers translating climate realities into accessible cultural forms.
India too is seeing signals of this shift. Films such as Kadvi Hawa and the animated short Wade explore drought, migration and climate futures that allows audiences to engage with climate realities through character and emotion. Michelin-starred chef Vikas Khanna’s book Ceremony of Aromas shows how changing climate patterns are already shaping the availability and memory of spices — reminding us that climate change is also about taste and tradition. Netflix India’s recent initiative, India’s first climate scriptwriting lab, mentors writers to integrate climate themes into mainstream stories. That a major global entertainment company has initiated such an approach suggests that climate narratives are also entering mainstream economic logic. Research increasingly shows that narrative and emotional connection influence how complex issues are understood and acted upon.
Across these efforts runs a shared intuition – stories, humour, food, music travel easier across languages, geographies and generations.
India’s Regional Language opportunity
Perhaps one of the most undexplored frontiers in this space is India’s extraordinary linguistic diversity. With over twenty two officially recognised languages and hundreds of dialects, India’s cultural landscape is not a single canvas but many each with its own idioms, oral traditions, musical forms and storytelling conventions. A climate story that travels in Hindi may not land the same way in Bhojpuri, Kannada or Tamil not because the underlying reality differs but because the emotional vocabulary does. Bhajans, lavani, Baul music, folk theatre these forms carry deep community trust and reach audiences that neither English-language media nor policy documents can.
The opportunity lies not just in translation but in genuine cultural rootedness; in climate narratives that emerge from within these traditions rather than being adapted into them. As India’s climate challenge plays out most acutely at the subnational level in villages, small towns and peri-urban spaces it is precisely these local cultural forms that hold the greatest potential to make the climate conversation feel like one’s own.
A closing reflection
When climate narratives travel through culture, people begin to see their lived realities reflected. It becomes more personal and transitions feel more collective and possible. Participation and engagement expands when people recognise their own stories in these transitions.
Meaningful and effective climate action will continue to require infrastructure, finance, institutional capacity and political will. But it will also require imagination. To borrow from Peter Drucker, if pop culture eats strategy for breakfast (and possibly lunch and dinner too), then it deserves a seat of equal standing at the climate table.
