A mid tense and long-winded negotiations, and with the future of the planet at stake, emotions can often run high at Cop climate summits. But last year, when the annual conference arrived in Brazil, one UN official was unexpectedly moved to tears by five women singing about the power of water.
“She gave me a massive hug after the event and said, ‘We need to bring music into Cop,’” says Nikita Llerena, the project manager for Flow, a music collective that’s hoping to bring art to the centre of the climate movement. What started as a handful of musicians meeting over Zoom last year has grown into a full-length album that unites female artists from around the world, including Charlotte Church , Maxine Peake and Nadine Shah. This month, members of the collective will return for Cop31, in Turkey, where they have been promoted to a slot at Global Cultural Action’s opening event.
“We are moving beyond awareness,” says Llerena. “Cop is now starting to realise the importance of art and culture to bring the climate debate forward. We can reach levels of human subjectivity that data alone cannot.”
The album focuses on the common theme of water, and is co-produced by Grammy winner Jennifer Decilveo. The artists have roots in Bangladesh, Canada, the UK, India, Brazil and beyond. Shingai, vocalist and bassist for the pop-rockers Noisettes, draws from her Zimbabwean heritage, singing in Shona about the importance of environmental conservation.
It’s an ambitious project in scale and intent. From heatwaves and wildfires across Europe to devastating flash floods in Nepal, the consequences of rising global temperatures have never felt so urgent. But can art bridge the gap between statistics, lived experience and meaningful political change?
“Music is the most powerful way to help people connect emotionally with what is happening,” says Church. Her song on the album – My Mother, the Ocean – begins as a hypnotic ode to water, developed from a sound-healing piece, before breaking into a distorted, electropop expression of mourning and rage. Amid the all-too-evident effects of global heating, says Church: “There’s an enormous amount of grief, at our separation from the natural world, at what’s being lost, and the fear and existentialism that’s wrapped up in all that. It requires people to feel, and so much of modernity is pushing us away from feeling.”
The album will also soundtrack a documentary that charts the experiences of women on the frontlines of the crisis. Márcia Mura, an Indigenous teacher from the Brazilian Amazon, is one of them. As a child, she could drink water directly from the Madeira River. Now, she says, the area resembles “a state of war”, damaged by severe floods and droughts that were exacerbated by local dams and pollution.
For Mura, a member of the Mura people, the inclusion of Indigenous voices in initiatives such as Flow is crucial. “The Indigenous people in Brazil have a slogan: ‘Nothing about us without us,’” she says, speaking through an interpreter. “It’s very important that we speak for ourselves, especially the women who are protagonists of this struggle.” Her point reflects research by UN Women , which found that women and girls are disproportionately affected by disasters, but it also speaks to Mura women’s spiritual relationship with water. “Women in the Amazon are the defenders of the waters,” she says, and these days, that goes beyond cultural tradition. Mura helped set up the Mura Collective, connecting women from different territories to share resources and defend their local waters. “When we protect the river, we protect our lives.”
Flow ends with a spoken-word piece, written and performed by Peake. It tells the story of a woman who, like Mura, harnesses her ancestral connection to water to protect her local riverbank from corporate development. In her telling, the woman is victorious.
Peake hopes Flow will inspire people to feel less helpless amid climate doomerism – to recognise that they, too, can make an impact. “Even if you don’t spark a revolution, it’s about slowly chipping away,” says Peake. “If enough people throw enough pebbles into the sea, we can cause a tidal wave.”
