Martha Wainwright, shown performing at the Glastonbury Festival this June, leaves for Arctic voyage Sept. 25. (Yui Mok/Associated Press)

Canadian singers Feist and Martha Wainwright will board a boat for Greenland later this month for a trip meant to inspire works about climate change.

They are taking part in Cape Farewell, a British program that invites musicians, poets, architects and other artists to join a scientific team on a research trip of the Arctic.

The goal of Cape Farewell is to have the artists learn first-hand about the science of climate change and then produce pop songs, novels and other works that will get the message out to the general public.

Folk-rocker Wainwright, sister of singer Rufus Wainwright, released her second album I Know You're Married, But I've Got Feelings Too, this year.

She says she's ready for a change of focus in her music.

"You know, I could use this as a shifting mechanism for myself as an artist, as well," she told CBC News. "You know, start to sing about things that aren't just my own emotional problem."

Feist, who has an international following, swept the Junos this year with hits such as 1234.

Both leave Sept. 25 on the ship, which will travel up the coast of Greenland to Disko Bay and the Jakobshavn glacier, which is losing 20 million tonnes of ice a day because of global warming.

They'll be in good company. Among the other artists on board will be British singer KT Tunstall, comedian Marcus Brigstocke, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, author Nicole Krauss, composer Jonathan Dove and Australian artist Kathy Barber.

Scientists from the British Geological Survey will be doing research on changes on the sea bottom from the ship.

The Arctic and Antarctic regions are both being adversely affected by global warming and the effects are more obvious than in temperate zones of the world.

Cape Farewell is a program founded by British artist David Buckland in 2001.

He argues artists are going to reach the public more effectively than scientists.

"Scientists have done a brilliant job of making us aware of climate change," he said.

"But ultimately, it's the way we live our lives that's a problem. So it's a cultural problem and we need a cultural shift," he said.

"They're talking in terms of graphs or scientific data and people just couldn't connect with that so the whole idea of Cape Farewell was to find some way of almost creating a new language that would engage with people so to create photographs, images, wonderful pieces of writing that did address climate change and were completely scientifically correct or informed and then we could get that out into the greater public."

Some of the program's former guests have already produced art to that end.

Booker Prize-winning writer Ian McEwan, who travelled in 2005, is now working on a novel inspired by climate change.

With files from Odile Nelson