About

For too long, dominant responses to climate change have treated it primarily as a scientific, technological, or policy problem. These approaches are essential, but they are not enough. Climate change is also a cultural crisis: it shapes how we understand our relationships to land, water, other species, one another, and the futures we are able to imagine.

Art and culture have a critical role to play in this work. Artists make environmental change visible and felt. They create spaces for encounter, experimentation, memory, critique, and collective imagination. They can connect forms of knowledge that are too often separated—scientific research and lived experience, Indigenous and place-based knowledge, technology and ecology, history and speculation.

Within this context, the UC Climate Action Arts Network (UC CAAN) was created in 2025 as a University of California-wide platform connecting artists, researchers, students, educators, cultural workers, and community partners working across art, climate, ecology, and public life.

Our work asks:

1. How can art and creative practice transform the ways climate change is understood, experienced, and acted upon?
2. How can artists, scientists, humanists, designers, and communities develop new forms of collaboration without collapsing the differences between their ways of knowing?
3. How can universities become sites for ecological experimentation, cultural change, and meaningful public engagement rather than simply places where climate problems are studied?
4. How can place-based, Indigenous, historical, scientific, and community knowledge inform more just and reciprocal relationships with land, water, species, and ecosystems?
5. How can archives, exhibitions, storytelling, and public programs preserve the cultural record of environmental change while also creating space for new possibilities to emerge?
6. How can emerging technologies be used critically and creatively in response to climate change while remaining attentive to their material, social, and environmental consequences?
7. What forms of culture, infrastructure, and collective imagination are necessary to move toward more resilient, equitable, and ecologically connected futures?

Based at UC Santa Cruz and extending across the University of California system, UC CAAN brings together a growing network of collaborators across campuses, communities, disciplines, and landscapes.

Rather than treating art as an illustration of climate science or a communication tool added at the end of research, UC CAAN understands creative practice as a form of inquiry in its own right, one capable of producing knowledge, challenging inherited assumptions, and helping us rehearse different ways of living within a changing world.