It is not just politicians who are descending on Glasgow for COP26. Here, too, trying to show the sheer weight of global public opinion that would have politicians do something very real and very immediate and very meaningful about the climate emergency, are artists, architects, scientists, activists, performers, inventors, musicians and otherwise concerned everyday folk.

There’s a strong contingent across all these from the indigenous communities around the world whose lives are strongly impacted by climate destructive activities. In amongst all the pomp of world leaders, this is a reminder of the importance of the local in the fight for the global.

Wander along the river from the COP26 venues to 220 Broomielaw, and you will find the sustainably constructed The Landing Hub, an architect-led installation for Glasgow City Council which has been built by New Practice Architects and Inhouse events with relatively sustainable local resources, aware of the climate toll taken by the usual temporary event structures.

Occupying a vacant space on the river front, it will act as a large collaborative venue for various art events related to COP26 and social justice and climate movements, from film screenings to banner-making workshops and large scale installations, all in the hopes of encouraging action.

Whilst there are a number of art installations, the most widely seen will be conceptual artist Robert Montgomery’s large scale light poem “Grace of the Sun”, some 11 metres x 5 metres, which will be launched later today. Montgomery, with the help of local community arts organisations, has constructed it from “Little Sun” solar lamps, which were originally designed by artist Olafur Eliasson – who many will know for his Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003 – and engineer Frederik Etteson as a lamp which can be distributed to off-grid communities to bring a bright, free light source to people and places which have no easy access to power.

Montgomery’s poem should shine brightly for roughly five hours after sunset, if all goes as per the “Little Sun” instructions, after which it may glow more subtly through the night, and should very much be worth a visit.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is Katy Dye’s Climate Grief Karaoke on 12th November, which the artist herself describes as “a ‘public service’ for people experiencing Ecological Grief to express difficult emotions via the medium of cheesy pop. There must surely be a market.

Perhaps more seriously, at least on the surface, is the architectural strand in the Landing Hub programming, which has a number of interesting talks and installations on sustainable building for the future, whether in Glasgow itself or, as per Paris-based Jakob+MacFarlane architects and artist Uili Louisi’s somewhat eye-popping floating city in their project Tongabove, designed to raise the Tongan capital above the rising Pacific sea waters.

In Brazil, it is not so much the water as the trees that are the issue, as the devastating deforestation that is occurring under Jair Bolsonaro continues apace, taking with it people and villages and ways of life. On 4th November, artists and “land defenders” from various countries including Brazil, Cambodia, and the UK, take over the Landing Hub courtesy of Brighton’s ONCA Gallery for a series of films and talks on the direct experience of environmental and cultural destruction in those countries. And on Friday 5 November, representatives from the Xingu river area in the Amazon, including filmmaker Takuma Kuikuro, will stage a one-day Indigenous Occupation, in tandem with People’s Palace Projects, which includes a fascinating-sounding workshop on the Karib language by singer Yamalui Kuikuro – a language which is spoken in just six villages in a specific area of Xingu (an area of staggering linguistic diversity) – and a showcase of Takuma’s films.

Kuikuro has been documenting his people’s potentially endangered way of life in this area of the Amazon, despite their robust history in evading colonial powers, for the past decade, the works intimate and observational, gently humorous in places.

Films such as The Day the Moon Menstruated and The Hyperwomen chart the Xingu stories and rituals, songs and dances, and a way of life that remains in harmony with nature. And you can’t help thinking, too, having watched some of Kuikuro’s films, that the environmentally friendly Passivhaus which features elsewhere in the Landing Hub spaces, along with other innovative building structures, cannot hold a candle to the impressive, thatched and environmentally-at-one structures of the Xingu people of the Amazon.

The Landing Hub, 220 Broomielaw, Glagow, www.thesustainableglasgowlanding.com/thelandinghub Until 14 Nov, Opening times vary throughout run, from 9am – 6pm, and 10pm on weekends (see listings). Entry free

Critic's Choice

Speaking as someone who has an unwitting ability to time west coast holidays with major international naval operations, I feel some embedded interest in Alex Boyd's absorbing and evocative collection of photographs at Stills. A reckoning of the military use that makes up a fair portion of our rural landscape – the bit that's not concerned with grouse and cocker spaniels – Tir an Airm (The Land of the Military) is a stark and at times intimate portrait of a largely unseen world beyond those somewhat terrifying red flags, a journey to the parts where walkers fear to tread. This is a land of big skies, big landscapes, big guns.

It all might be so peaceful, on the surface. And yet here they are, dummy churches and dummy insurgents scattered about the dips and gullies, air reconnaissance targets and the wrecks of tanks littering the open expanses from Cape Wrath to Sgribhis Bheinn and roads south, parked on the edge of the land as target practice for warships, or abandoned in a spot of otherwise pristine peat bog. All around, the echoes of past lives, the relentlessness of the human potential for aggression and nature's patience. For this is what perhaps interests Boyd, in the end, the meeting point between nature and human, our destructive war play bound to finish - repeated generation on generation - in an old infantry target, mown down, grass growing through the bullet holes. Nature reclaims, in the end, although not always in the way she began.

Alex Boyd: Tir an Airm (The Land of the Military), Stills Centre for Photography, 23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, 0131 622 6200 www.stills.org Until 13 Nov Tue—Sat, 12pm—5pm

Don't Miss

The National Museum of Scotland investigates themes related to COP 26 this Autumn with three small exhibitions, from Luke Jerram's Extinction Bell, which rings out up to 200 times a day in the Grand Hall to mark when a species has been lost forever, to an immersive installation by Edinburgh collective "And If Not Now, When" showing how we can affect our environment, ideally for the better. Here, too, a small exhibition on work being done by various organisations in Scotland on technological innovations to fight climate change.

National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh, 0300 1236789 www.nms.ac.uk And If Not Now, When? 1-14 Nov; other exhibitions until Spring 2022, Daily 10am - 5pm