In times of growing awareness of climate change and the need to adapt social behaviour accordingly, art emerges as a particularly empowering format that can potentially contribute to a cultural paradigm shift
In terms of climate policy, the launch of the Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action, an international coalition of UN Member States aimed at building political momentum for the recognition of culture as a uniquely powerful force in climate change policy, at COP28 confirms this statement.
Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS)
Through its interdisciplinary approach, the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) combines cutting-edge climate science with insights from the social sciences and the arts in order to accelerate the essential transformation. In other words, GERICS embodies the fusion of evidence-based climate knowledge, socially relevant solutions, and artistically transformative perspectives.
Science informs, but art transforms
(Javier Cortada, eco and public artist, at this year’s Future Congress in Chile)
With Climate Service and Art (CS+ART) since 2022, GERICS acts as an interface between climate science and art, as a lab for exchange between scientists and artists, as an information desk for the art-science community and as a partner in European art-science projects.
As a service at the interface of climate science and art, it has a special network that connects scientists with matching artists, in particular for the many artists-in-residence programmes of the Helmholtz Association. Conversely, taking into account their climate-related artistic research, it connects artists with suitable in-house climate scientists.
We need the voice of artists to emphatically communicate the need for transformation (Claudia Roth, German Minister of State for Culture and the Media, at the recent Sustainability Transformation Conference 2025 in Berlin)
‘Art meets Science’
With this in mind, we brought artists into the interdisciplinary research fellowship ‘Art meets Science’ of the Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HIDA), 2022/23 and enabled the fellows to exchange their artistic research ‘DiscoEarth’ with in-house climate and social scientists for three months.
The sequel ‘DiscoPlanet: Letheia’ has been invited to the Ars Electronica Festival 2023.
As a partner of ‘City Climate meets Creative Coding’, a project of the City Science Lab (CSL) of the HafenCity University Hamburg (HCU) funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, one climate and one social scientist from GERICS each advised the artists in their creative process. A very special exchange took place in the art project Citizen AI, see min. 2:05-2:41.
We are currently working closely with a media artist who has fed his digital climate installation with climate data from GERICS, visualised them and combined them with sound data from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), see The World in a Painting.
CS+ART is also involved in EU projects
In ‘The Human-Tech Nexus. Building a Safe Haven to Cope with Climate Extremes’ (The HuT), https://thehut-nexus.eu/events/, we are bridging science and technology with art. The artistic intervention ‘Welcome to 2050 – Adapt or Succumb’, based on the co-creation of scientists, artists and students, is a model of outreach: four publications have reported on the project, the documentary film on the exhibition was even shown at the Royal Academy of Bhutan.
GERICS represents The HuT’s artistic interventions at EU conferences. At ECCA 2023, together with Playback Theatre Dublin, we performed ‘Weather extremes are going to hit you! Early Warning Systems are going to “HuT” you!’. At EGU 2024 we held the session ‘Art-science cross-fertilisation. The HuT: good practice of project-based collaboration’, see EGU 2024. We were invited at UNDRR 2024, Ignite Stage with ‘The HuT: Art as a Driving Link’, see UNDRR 2024.
In essence, the blend of art and science is becoming increasingly recognised as a powerful tool in shaping the future of climate action. As GERICS and other organisations demonstrate, this collaboration can lead to transformative experiences that both inform and inspire.
