Climate and Culture

Climate Heritage Network was founded in 2019 with the mission of mobilizing arts culture and heritage for climate action foregrounding the cultural dimensions of the climate emergency and scaling out culture-based solutions. It is a diverse organization. It includes all types of organizations. Pathway of choosing to make culture and climate one of the priorities. I think that because there is no pathway to holding global warming to 1.5 degrees, even to 2 degrees. Culture is an enabling condition for transformative planet action, the role is essential to tackle climate emergency. Daunting: there is culture-sized hole in global climate policy making and global climate planning  Economy without culture is what has given us climate change. What is climate planning and action without culture? COP26 prioritize the focus in technological solutions, there is avoidance in cultural dimension. Why? Because of the complexity of the intersection of culture and climate. Culture is part of the solution to climate change, social cohesion, traditional knowledge... but it is also a part of the problem of climate change, at least in the industrialized nations it has been an extractive take-make waste consumption approach to society that has given us climate change. We have been living with that for hundreds of years, in many places environmental humanities calls that we have a Petro-Culture. How do we distinguish between the elements of culture and heritage that are part of the solution and the elements that are part of the problem?. Trade-offs and synergies: conflicts between climate action and culture and it tends to manifest itself in flash points like putting solar panels in historic buildings. Lack of ability to imagine what a post-carbon society looks like. We need people that help us imagine to imagine 

Culture as a key driving force is very important.  Focus on self-interest is focus in competition and efficiency, it is focused on carbon prices, in the biophysical reality we live in.   Core drivers behind all of this are particular views of the world on development.   We don’t engage with very simple questions which every citizen has to deal with.    We have to change our way of cooking, drinking, what we wear… collectively.    We have to first embrace the challenge which is ourselves.   Accept that climate change is a fact.  We need to take responsibility for what we have done.   A lot of people that are not responsible of this are going to suffer from it.     It doesn’t matter if you are in NY or London, our ecosystems are going to collapse.    We have to act individually and together now.   We cannot trade-off, we have to do all together.    It is about choice, simple things.   Opportunity to aloud film, music, films, poetry to be able to capture these things in our context because the challenge of climate is both universal but the responses have to be local and grounded.    When that start to happen, then the narrative would change 

Intergenerational equity. Linkages between climate crisis and biodiversity crisis.

Culture and climate change we are trying to change what people interpret as experiences and the way people behave.    A lot of the culture comes from the past; the present modifies that and creates new facets.   How can we bring a culture of risk reduction? One of the tools that cities are using is the Sendai Framework for reducing the disaster risks but what we need is the localization of that.  The implementation has been national driven but over the years we are coordinating cities to localize this risk reduction in the local governments and further into the communities.    Impacts: there is a culture of fatalism so it needs to be deal with trying to look at how can we actually reduce the risk and change that trajectory.   We have to examine how past disasters were documented.    There is no mythology without disasters.   What has impacted the narration of those disasters and how was the data collected from the event? We need to be aware of what is happening.  It is important and put in context If some corrections are needed.   Telling life lessons, passing on the experience is important.   Cities can play a big role in helping museums contribute to this resilience building culture around the world.    Assessment methodology.    The reconstruction also needs to look at the culture heritage.    How do we make the institutions, the collections, the museums that we operate to climate risks 

Urgency.   Culture is a resource for addressing climate change impacts.   Role for climate change mitigation and adaptation.   African youth are now more aware of the implication of casually dropping plastic waste on our streets.   We use elements such as dance and music to advocate for healthy environments.    Sacrifice to get the results that we want 

How to link culture to the transformation process. Culture for the people and nationalities has been a symbol of resistance against the oppressed. Although in the past they were physical chains, today there are still diverse forms of oppression.   It is to strengthen solidarity, ancestry, to demonstrate the need to strengthen stronger agendas because the concern is in the international arena but we need to strengthen the municipal movements. 
We need practices and commitments that generate real transformations with political will in the planning and also in the budget.   The transformation cannot be only through the signing of agreements as some governments do, but rather with will and actions.

For us, from the feminist movement, there are two basic types of culture that are of concern to us. One is the material culture. I think Andrew and Aromar Revi also mentioned that earlier, the material culture, the physical things produced by a society. We are now driven a lot by the material culture that seems to be like driving development. The definition of development is to build, build, build, having something new, new, new. With the advance of technology, we have to change many of our devices. You come to think of how that actually relates to our environment, the impact to our environment. With local government and government in general, the policy they have for development is very important. The relationship of how to balance, making sure that whatever they do does not have adverse impact on our culture. Or at least now to stop some of the development trends or practices that have really shown the adverse impact on our climate. That relates to learning. Learning from experience and disasters that have impacted us. Then there is the non-material culture, the intangible things produced by society. That is as important as the material culture. How do we connect these two? For women, these two are very important. When we talk about feminism, it's about gender equality, women empowerment, and how we make sure this is part of the development process and part of how we work together and how we make sure that we preserve and we have the world that we want to leave behind for our future generations. Part of the cultural heritage, the way people used to build their buildings, and the knowledge that women have that may have been belittled by development processes need to be brought back and accepted and relearned.  

In the next GOLD report we discuss pathways around the cities and venues that we connect with nature and democratizing pathways. From the re-naturing chapter that's been original and is available. This social contract is about a future that requires a reframing of urban and natural systems. This is reframed in a cultural tense. The responses need to be locally grounded. We need to find ways of local spaces have a leading role in leading these agendas. This is a task. Governments have a very important role in the issue of breaking path dependency and environmental degradation. With concrete promotion of the things that governments do. Like protecting communities from the process of gentrification and civil society.  Questions of energy and waste, recycling. Governments can support these trajectories.