When I and my colleague Brikesh wrote about how climate action needs culture, a friend responded with something that stayed: “Culture doesn’t just move people. It creates value. It helps us imagine the best possible version of what comes next. We don’t necessarily lack climate solutions. We lack the ability sometimes to picture them.”
The shift towards climate action and resilience is as much social and civic as it is technological, political or financial. To be clear, this is not to underplay the importance of policy, governance, science, technology or fair finance. In fact, all of these are fundamental. Whether it is climate adaptation, agriculture, heat preparedness, public health or energy systems, there are tools and pathways to move forward. The difficult and often contentious conversations internationally around equitable and fair-share climate finance themselves reflect this reality.
But even when policy is aligned, technology exists and is accessible, and finance is available, progress can stall or move slowly. Not necessarily because the solutions are wrong, but because people, communities and other microcosms – or, for that matter, societies at large – rarely move towards futures that they cannot meaningfully recognise themselves within. And that’s true not only for climate action but for public change more broadly. People rarely move to futures they experience as abstract, prescriptive, imposed or disconnected from their everyday lives.
And this is increasingly an evolving pattern across many strands of work we’re involved in at Asar – with governments, industry, communities, academia, creators and the wider civil society ecosystem. Our work sits at the intersection of climate, governance and everyday decision-making, trying to support the evolution of pathways that are equitable, practical and grounded in lived realities while being systemically relevant. Alongside this, we’ve also been exploring how culture and public imagination expand the climate conversation itself. In this article, we share the key strands that emerge.
How futures begin entering public life
In many ways, various versions of climate conversations are unfolding across different scales and geographies. From global discussions around transitioning away from fossil fuels at Santa Marta recently and debates on fair-share climate finance, to India’s evolving conversations around MSME decarbonisation, heat resilience and climate education, there is intent, negotiation and effort underway. At the same time, these are also beginning to surface much closer to everyday life; from international efforts around food systems and methane reduction, to conversations around Delhi’s draft EV policy to village-level adaptation planning in places like Kozhikode’s Moodadi Panchayat, cool-roof programmes in Tamil Nadu schools or farmer producer collectives experimenting with climate-resilient agriculture in Bihar. Not necessarily as singular breakthroughs, but as attempts at (re)shaping systems, behaviours and everyday public life.
For instance, mobility conversations are moving beyond roads and flyovers into questions of inclusion, frequency, access and everyday life. Rooftop solar adoption has required policy announcements and political support of course, but it’s also required engaging with communities and resident associations, engaging banks, creating local trust, and supporting people in navigating unfamiliar systems. In many ways, these shifts travel less like campaigns and more like social habits slowly percolating into everyday life.
Changes like these are often social before they become technical, travelling through networks of trust and participation as much as through announcements or policy frameworks. Through panchayats, resident associations, self-help groups, creators, local journalists and informal conversations. Essentially, people often adopt futures socially before they adopt them technologically or politically.
And that is also why some of the more durable pathways emerge through these processes of trust, experimentation and participation rather than singular interventions. Sometimes messy, occasionally contradictory and rarely linear.
The slower work underneath public change
Similar threads are appearing elsewhere too. Women’s collectives in Odisha and Maharashtra mapping commons and climate risks together. Panchayats in Kerala recognising tidal flooding as a climate issue rather than seasonal inconvenience. Community health workers in Jharkhand engaging with clean cooking not only through the language of emissions or air pollution but through health, care and family well-being.
In Wayanad, Rajesh, a friend who’s an organic farmer, market entrepreneur and coordinator of the Thirunelly Agri Producer Company Ltd (TAPCO), has been at the centre of efforts experimenting with climate calendars and adaptive farming responses as monsoons become increasingly unpredictable. What’s powerful is not only the agricultural planning itself, but the process of communities learning how to read and respond to ecological uncertainty together.
All of these in different ways are examples of how climate realities slowly begin entering everyday life. And that’s perhaps where behaviour, participation and culture begin to matter differently. Not only as art or performance, but as part of the streams through which people decide what feels trustworthy, normal, aspirational or even worth trying in the first place.
Sometimes, this looks like neighbours influencing rooftop solar adoption more successfully than policies and advertisements, women’s collectives shaping farming or water practices together, comedians making climate feel less distant, or local chroniclers helping heatwaves get understood as a public health issue rather than just “an unusual summer”. This is also how collective legitimacy and ownership slowly gets built around public change.
This is partly why some of my organisation’s explorations through the Climate Culture Collective have been less about awareness initiatives and more about creating different entry points into climate conversations. Through comedy experiments like Laughs Per Minute, satirical theatre such as Fever Dream, climate mixers, and conversations with screenwriters and creators. Part of the intention has been to explore how climate can enter mainstream storytelling without sounding catastrophic or instructional, and whether it can slowly become part of familiar emotional worlds and everyday narratives instead.
Even institutions like the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) are beginning to rethink how heatwaves get measured and declared across India, reflecting a broader shift from seeing heat as seasonal discomfort towards recognising it as a structural public health and livelihood challenge.
Heat itself is becoming one of the most visible public faces of climate change in India, entering conversations around work, housing, urban inequality, labour productivity, public health and everyday survival rather than remaining confined to the climate-environmental discourse alone.
None of these on their own ‘solve’ climate change of course! But they do create recurring pathways through which climate enters everyday conversation and public imagination without people immediately shutting down, moralising or feeling excluded from it.
Friends like Diya and Stefan at Mindworks Lab have also been exploring related questions around climate, behaviour and agency; particularly how fear and information alone rarely produce sustained public participation. Their work points to something deceptively simple but important; that people often move through trust, familiarity and belonging as much or possibly more than through facts or information.
Versions of these emerge elsewhere too. Across exchanges with fellow Climate Breakthrough awardees working in very different contexts, there’s recognition that climate futures are not only policy, technological or market but relational and civic ones too. Whether through Isabel Cavelier’s work on shared futures and Mundo Común, or Denise Fairchild’s Ubuntu community-rooted climate justice and local stewardship, the underlying braid is strikingly similar.
When change starts feeling normal
Some of the more successful public shifts carry this lesson quietly underneath them. Cycling in the Netherlands, for instance, did not just happen because bicycle lanes appeared. It evolved through public pressure, safety movements, urban redesign and civic choices that made cycling feel dignified and ordinary. Having lived in the Netherlands for over a decade, what stayed with me was not just the infrastructure itself but how deeply cycling had entered everyday public behaviour and imagination. It didn’t feel like an environmental choice or issue alone. It simply felt normal.
Mainstream entertainment ecosystems are also engaging climate themes not simply as activism, but as part of the storytelling. Initiatives such as Good Energy in Hollywood and Netflix India are trying to integrate climate into film and television narratives in ways that feel human rather than analytical or didactic. Even some of our recent conversations with screenwriters in Mumbai were less about massaging ‘climate messaging’ into cinema and more about whether climate can slowly enter familiar emotional worlds and everyday storytelling itself. And we are increasingly also seeing communicators of different stripes and languages, connecting heatwaves to work, health and lived urban realities instead of just temperature data.
None of this reduces the importance of policy, finance, governance and technological breakthroughs. If anything, it will make them more durable. Policy and implementation set direction, technology creates possibilities and finance helps accelerate scale. But these shifts endure when people feel they have a meaningful place in the futures being proposed.
Sanjiv Gopal is Chief of Strategy & Planning at Asar. Along with Vinuta Gopal and Brikesh Singh, Asar is a Climate Breakthrough awardee from the 2022 cohort. The award has supported Mycelium, their effort to connect ‘the systemic with the everyday’ in understanding how climate transitions move through public life and imagination, institutions and lived realities. Mycelium works through distributed problem-solving, trust-based, relational collaboration, and locally grounded climate responses.
