On 1 October, we launched the Climate Emergency Mixtape at The Humming Tree in Bengaluru, bringing together six independent artists from across India to tell stories of the climate crisis through music. A collaboration between Asar, Climate Culture Collective, Youth Ki Awaaz, Krantinaari and Folksoul, the project explores a simple but powerful idea: what if we moved climate communication beyond reports, panel discussions and conventional awareness campaigns, and into the music people listen to, share and connect with? Through multilingual rap rooted in lived experiences, the artists explore everything from Bengaluru’s water crisis and Delhi’s air pollution to the destruction of the Aravallis and the disproportionate burden of environmental degradation on marginalised communities.
What makes this approach distinctive is that we aren’t simply using artists to communicate an existing climate narrative; we’re creating space for them to tell their own stories. The result is a collection of deeply local perspectives that connect environmental change with questions of caste, class, gender, livelihoods and inequality. The project has already sparked conversations beyond the music scene: Veppa Marathadiyila, a track by Tamil Nadu’s all-women rap collective Sollisai Sistahs, led to an hour-long conversation with Rajya Sabha MP Praveen Chakravarty. It is an encouraging example of how culture can take climate conversations into unexpected spaces and make them more personal, relatable and grounded in people’s everyday realities.
For us at Asar and the Climate Culture Collective, the mixtape is part of a larger effort to decentralise climate communication through culture, moving beyond the usual voices, formats and audiences to make room for stories from across India. The ambition is not just to produce an album, but to explore how music and other cultural forms can help reshape the way we understand and talk about the climate crisis. As we look ahead to future editions, the question is how we can take this model to more regions, languages and communities, building a richer, more diverse cultural response to the climate emergency. Read more about the project and its approach in Mid-Day.