Writing for Change: How Songs Can Inspire Climate Action

Why do we write lyrics for our songs? I’m sure we all have reasons, but a big one for many of us will be to let listeners know that they’re not alone, and they’re not the only person who feels this way — and that reason is particularly relevant to climate.

A 2024 study found that 69% of people are willing to contribute some of their income towards fighting climate change, but when asked to say how many people would do that, those same respondents guessed an average of 43%. This is the “climate perception gap” — many of us who are fighting against climate change think we’re doing so as a minority, but we’re actually the majority.

Making change on a public level also has much more support than you might think. “In late 2025, 77% of the UK public said they were concerned about climate change, 68% supported government action to tackle it and only 12% opposed it (DESNZ, 2025a). 64% of people said they supported the target of net zero by 2050 if not earlier, with only 11% opposed to a target altogether”.

That nudge from a song can inspire action

When we write about the climate emergency, we’re telling people they’re not alone, not even in a minority, but part of a much bigger movement and something that people genuinely care about.

It can often feel futile to talk to friends and family about climate, but that nudge from a song can inspire people to talk, and realise others feel the same way. That then has knock-on effects like people deciding to fly less, eat less meat, drive an electric car or use public transport (which are among the most effective individual climate actions).

Individual carbon footprint is a problematic concept in itself though, because when the system that we work in leaves few alternatives, it’s very hard to avoid polluting activities.

But we’re also, perhaps more importantly, communicating the need and demand for action to decision makers. A song on the radio, or in a concert, can reach the people in society who actually make the decisions to set governmental electric car targets, invest in fossil fuels, decide on corporate sponsors, and all those other upstream decisions which drive the system that creates individual carbon footprints.

So, who else is working on this?

There’s a huge amount of work going on in this space. I work mostly with choirs with the aim to get serious songs about climate change into the repertoire of more advanced singers.

But there are also many wonderful groups out there in classical/folk music such as Kai Honey’s Climate Choir Movement, the Orchestra for the Earth, Boff Whalley’s Commoners Choir, and in popular music there’s Music Declares Emergency and EarthPercent.

If you’d like to get involved at a more upstream level, there’s Julie’s Bicycle, Creative Carbon Scotland, and the Scottish Classical Sustainability Group just for starters. As with the general public, you might think you’re in a minority among musicians in caring about this. You definitely aren’t! There are lots of people working on this — come and join us.

What else could I do?

As mentioned above, individual carbon footprint has its issues. But on the other hand, it’s hard to take a pro-climate message seriously when the person giving it owns a private jet.

Westlake, Demski and Pidgeon’s research showed that “visible leading by example from politicians and celebrities significantly increases the willingness of members of the UK public to make these high-impact low-carbon choices”. The climate message from bigger names is much more credible when it comes from groups like Massive Attack who have put in a lot of hard work to be as environmentally friendly as possible.

You don’t have to dedicate your entire life to going green, but if you look at the big low-hanging fruit in your work and life — reduce or cut out flying, reduce or cut out eating meat, switch to an EV or public transport, avoid fast fashion — and take some visible action in those high-impact areas, it’ll inspire your audience to do the same and also give you more authenticity when making demands to senior decision makers.

I’d add that it’s important to avoid climate purity tests. If we judge people for drinking from a plastic bottle (tiny impact), we’re more likely to alienate them from the climate movement than to have a positive effect.

Lyrics that place the guilt on your audience are ineffective and will drive them away — and it’s also putting the blame in the wrong place, because our current fossil-fuelled system was created by oil and gas companies who already knew the damage that was being done and encouraged everyone to use their products anyway, often actively sabotaging any research that showed they were wrong and working to discredit green alternatives. (If that makes you angry, that might be your next song.)

Some lyrics of my own and why I wrote them

As a choral composer, I often set texts written by other people rather than creating my own, but sometimes there simply isn’t anything out there or there’s a request for something very specific.

In the case of Choirs for Ecocide Law, the team asked me to write something that explained the current world situation without ecocide law and what damage is happening that could be prevented by it. Below is an excerpt from “The Rules”, the rest is available at Choirs For Climate or as part of the Choirs for Ecocide Law suite of songs, for free.

If anyone would like to cover this with a rock band of some kind I’d love to hear it! It’s available under a Creative Commons license and you can download the full score from the site in a couple of different keys.

The start of “If The World Were Ours” came to me in a dream:

“Wind And Sun” is a lot more straightforward, and is basically a sea shanty about wind and solar power:

Hope, change, and constructive solutions through music

Getting back to my point at the start about showing people that others feel the same way, lately I’ve been thinking more about what emotions and messages I’m sending through music.

You can see several different things here: “The Rules” is mostly about anger and despair at the current situation; “If The World Were Ours” is wondering why people can’t think long-term and look for sustainable ways to live; “Wind And Sun” is to show that there are solutions out there, mostly based on the very simple fact that we need to stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from other sources such as the giant free fusion reactor in the sky...

Anger is valid and important, and there’s lots of justified anger about climate change and songs about that, but most of our listeners need more than just anger. Hope, change, and constructive solutions are needed, and music can show these too.

Let’s get out there and write songs about tough subjects that make a difference to the world.