Can art save the world from environmental catastrophe?

No. Well, not on its own.

But art can help us understand the impact our societies have had on the world we live in and inspire us to take action.

The term climate emergency wouldn't have meant much to artist L.S. Lowry but his paintings of the north of England show the effects of mass industrialisation on the natural and urban landscape.

Billowing clouds of smoke from huge factories dominate the scene. The people seem anonymous and powerless in comparison.

In Simryn Gill’s photographic series Channel humans aren't visible at all. We only see what they've left behind. Gill's photos document the pollution of the mangrove forests in her hometown of Port Dickson in Malaysia. The rubbish almost seems part of the natural world: brightly coloured flowers or fruit hanging from the trees.

There's a cargo ship on the horizon. Perhaps Gill is pointing to globalised trade and the uneven impact it has on nature and local communities.

In this work artist Abbas Akhavan covers

the gallery floor

with bronze sculptures of plants

native to Iraq

Study for a Monument was made

with the assistance of images

provided to me by

Dr. Sophie Neil

from the Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh

Working from these images

I sculpted these plants out of wax

much larger than their actual size

to make them this scale

of what you would find

at the base of a monument

Laid out on white bedsheets

the sculptures

resemble specimens

undergoing scientific study

confiscated goods

objects in a street market

or bodies prepared for mass burial

When I was watching on television

and in newspapers

images of the Iraq invasion

iconoclastic images of American soldiers

tearing down these massive

egomaniacal monuments

that Saddam Hussein

had built for himself

I was thinking of

How do you reconsider the kind of human

centric memorials and monuments

that are often pyramid shaped?

This kind of pyramid vertical shape

is something

that I responded to with this work

which is horizontal

fragmented

has a bit of a more precarious

or transient mode of display

After the first Gulf War in 1991

Saddam Hussein destroyed

the Mesopotamian marshlands

to eradicate the Shia

rebels who lived there

The technology to drain the

marshes had been developed

by the occupying

British Mandate

earlier in the 20th century

This work is aimed at reconsidering

what we memorialise

One of the things that we don't consider

in a popular collective consciousness

is the ecological damage of war

What happens to the soil and the toxicity

on the ecology

of the landscape

in the aftermath of these wars?

Otobong Nkanga is interested

in the bling

of everyday cosmetics and technology

and our disconnection

from the social

and environmental

cost of their production

I think one thing

I would like to talk about

was the notion of

dependency and of addiction

When you see that kinds of scars

we have in our landscape

we are drug addicts in a way

and the drug is the resources

If we start thinking in such a way

that we're that connected

and that we are also

part of elements that are in the soil

we will maybe

think of the way we work

within our landscape differently

Some artists work with

the landscape directly

taking action

outside of museums and galleries

During the Venice Biennale in 1968

Nicolás García Uriburu

poured a chemical called Fluorescein

into the waters of the Grand Canal

This nontoxic chemical

reacted with micro-organisms in the water

and turned the canal bright green

He was making a point

about water pollution

and how we need to treat this precious

and increasingly scarce resource

with more care and respect

He went on to repeat this action

in rivers and coastlines around the world

In different ways

Artists bring us face to face

with the realities

of natural destruction

whether through climate

war

or pollution

They also urge us to think about new ways

of imagining a more sustainable world

and prompt us to take collective

action to make it a reality