Article

Our work on Reimagining Museums for Climate Action has been significantly informed by prior research and collaborations undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures research programme. 

The Heritage Futures research programme set out to explore how heritage practices, broadly defined, contribute to the making of future worlds. From 2015 to 2019, an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers (led by Principal Investigator Rodney Harrison) collaborated with 25 international partner organisations and many others to investigate heritage and heritage-like practices in a broad range of fields and contexts, and to explore the potential for innovation and creative exchange within and across them.  

The research programme aimed to: 

• Document and analyse practices by which pasts, presents and futures are assembled across a range of different heritage and heritage-like domains, by exploring them through mixed ethnographic and creative visual methods, in comparative perspective; 

• Draw on this empirical research to understand and theorise the values that are generated by the work that is undertaken in caring for futures, within each of these heterogeneous domains; and 

• Explore, in partnership with its project partners, how those different practices of assembling and caring for the future might be creatively redeployed to generate innovation, foster resilience and encourage sustainability.

Henry McGhie and Rodney Harrison co-curated a major exhibition hosted by the Manchester Museum which was inspired by the Heritage Futures research programme. The exhibition was developed over the period 2017–18 with inputs from other members of the research programme and museum staff and hosted by the museum from December 2018 until the museum closed due to COVID lockdown restrictions in March 2020. 



Heritage Futures was succeeded by the follow-on project Landscape Futures and the Challenge of Change: Towards Integrated Cultural/Natural Heritage Decision Making, funded under the AHRC Landscape Decisions/Changing Landscapes Follow-on Fund for Impact and Engagement Call. This project was  awarded to a project team which included Principal Investigator Caitlin DeSilvey (University of Exeter); Co-Investigators Rodney Harrison (University College London), Hannah Fluck (Historic England), Rosie Hails (The National Trust), Ingrid Samuel (The National Trust), and the organisation Natural England as project partner. 

The final publication from the Heritage Futures research programme is available for free in open access from UCL Press at the link below. Further information is available on the Heritage Futures website.



Harrison, R., DeSilvey, C., Holtorf, C., Macdonald, S., Bartolini, N., Breithoff, E., Fredheim, H., Lyons, A., May, S., Morgan, J. and Penrose, S. 2020. Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices . London: UCL Press.



Heritage Futures

Film

What is a museum’s purpose? How can museums and the cultural sector transform to meet the demands of the climate emergency? What broader pathways does this open for considering the relationship between institutions and activism, for our current moment and for the future? 

As part of Climate Week NYC, Miranda Massie, Director of the Climate Museum and a member of the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action competition jury, discussed these questions with Mark Chambers, then Director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Sustainability. 

You can watch a recording of the conversation here. 

 



Miranda Massie and Mark Chambers in Conversation

This essay by Colin Sterling and Rodney Harrison originally appeared in The Conversation. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license. 

When Victorian tea-merchant Frederick Horniman was looking to build a new home for his extensive collection of natural and cultural artefacts, his own back garden offered the perfect spot. Situated on one of the highest points in London, Surrey Mount – the Horniman family home – enjoyed commanding views across the city. The surrounding area of Forest Hill was a thriving suburb, and Horniman sought to “bring the world” to this growing community by making his collection accessible to everyone.

Architect Charles Harrison Townsend was commissioned to design the new museum, which opened in 1901. Soon afterwards, Horniman presented the museum and 15 acres of gardens to the London County Council as a gift in perpetuity for the “recreation, instruction and enjoyment” of the people of London.

Like many museums around the world, the Horniman was forced to close temporarily in March 2020 to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The gardens remained open throughout lockdown, taking on a vital role for the local community during this period of forced isolation. The sloping lawn where Surrey Mount once stood became an impromptu gathering place to watch the sun set across the city’s now empty skyscrapers.

It was around this time that the museum was added to a crowd-sourced map of statues, monuments, named buildings and streets to “shine a light on the continued adoration of colonial icons and symbols”. Although known as a philanthropist and social reformer in Britain, Horniman’s wealth, like that of many of the founder’s of Britain’s museums, was acquired through colonial exploitation – in his case, the tea trade.

As the museum’s Chief Executive Nick Merriman noted in an article written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, tea growing was “labour intensive, poorly compensated and, in many cases, used indentured or forced labour”. Similarly, its collections include objects such as a number of Benin Bronzes, which were obtained through colonial violence.



In many ways this is a familiar story. The emergence of the public museum in the 18th and 19th centuries cannot be disentangled from painful histories of colonial subjugation and exploitation. While Horniman’s desire to bring the world to south London may have been enacted in a spirit of education and social “improvement”, the very idea of building a museum to collect, order and display the world speaks to a broader mindset of western dominion over other cultures – and nature.

As many scholars have shown, hierarchical notions of race and culture developed and perpetuated by museums underpinned violent practices around the globe and continue to do so today. They also supported a vision of European exceptionalism that helped to justify a harmful relationship with the natural world, encouraging ideals of progress and exploitative understandings of nature as a resource.

This attitude has been challenged repeatedly as part of anti-racist, anti-colonial and pro-environmental institutional reform. Now, in the shadow of a climate and ecological emergency that is impacting on all areas of social, political and economic life, the very purpose of museums is again being called into question.

Reimagining museums

While the Horniman may be an archetypal museum in many respects, it also contains a few surprises. Alongside galleries dedicated to natural history, anthropology and musical instruments, visitors can explore a butterfly house, a small animal park, and an aquarium that is home to an innovative research project exploring coral reef reproduction.

This unusual combination of natural and cultural collections, outdoor spaces and zoological research was highlighted in the museum’s climate and ecology manifesto, published in January 2020. As well as plans to minimise waste, reduce pollution and invest in environmental research, the manifesto calls for a suite of changes related to the collections, the site and the organisation. It makes clear that while museums may be “institutions of the long term”, they have a “moral and ethical imperative to act now” in the fight against global warming.

From Anchorage to Sydney, this call to action has resonated across the sector in recent years. While the scale and urgency of climate change can often seem overwhelming, museums are beginning to recognise that they have a crucial role to play in shaping and supporting society’s response to this crisis. Just as the Horniman gardens became a restorative meeting space during lockdown, the purpose of museums more broadly is ripe for reimagining in the era of climate change.

But what might this look like? Earlier in 2020 we launched an international design and ideas competition to gather responses to this question. Over 250 submissions were received from 48 countries, with proposals from architects, designers, activists, artists, student groups, academics, indigenous communities and those already working in museums globally.

The brief was purposefully expansive: against the backdrop of a rapidly changing environment, what would it mean for museums to actively shape a more just and sustainable future for all?

Practical solutions and speculative concepts were equally welcome. While some responded with proposals to create more sustainable museum buildings, or develop new exhibitions on climate change, others sought to redefine the very foundations of museological thinking and practice. The eight finalists are currently developing their ideas for an exhibition at Glasgow Science Centre ahead of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference COP26, which will take place in Glasgow in November 2021.

A historical reckoning

For some museums, looking to the future in this way will mean confronting their own complicity in many of the forces that have brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse.

The term museum now embraces a dizzying variety of buildings, projects, ideas and experiences. But their roots can be traced to the princely palaces and cabinets of curiosity of the 17th century – spaces in which powerful individuals assembled and displayed their most notable possessions.

In Britain, Sir Hans Sloane’s collection – one of the largest in the country when he died in 1753 – included “curiosities” and natural specimens from North and South America, the East Indies and the West Indies. Sloane – who was born in Ireland in 1660 and found fame as a physician to the aristocracy – acquired the wealth to build his collection from enslaved labour on Jamaican sugar plantations. Sloane’s collection provided the foundation for the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, a legacy that both institutions are now beginning to grapple with.

Most recently, in August 2020, the British Museum announced that it had moved a bust of Sloane to a new display case, where it could be reinterpreted alongside artefacts related to the British empire. While many museums are increasingly willing to acknowledge the many ways in which their own histories are bound up with ongoing debates around race and inequality, drawing threads between these injustices and the problem of climate change has yet to become common. Instead, it regularly falls to outside voices to make these connections clear.

The work of activist group BP or Not BP? is a case in point here. Known for their highly theatrical protests, BP or Not BP? occupied the British Museum for three days in February, taking over galleries and creating a new sculptural artwork in the museum’s Great Court, partially supported by staff and at least one member of the museum’s board. They sought to shine a spotlight on the impact of BP around the world, drawing attention to the different ways in which “the museum’s own history and that of its sponsor were born out of colonialism and empire”.

Moving statues and reinterpreting collections can only go so far in this respect. As BP or Not BP? argue, reimagining what a “truly enlightened, responsible and engaged British Museum could look like” will require radical, systemic change.

Architect John Zhang’s proposal for our competition - titled The British Museum of Decolonized Nature - offers one vision of what such change might look like. With the museum emptied of its colonial artefacts, Zhang imagines nature taking over. This is not a dystopian wasteland, but a purposefully programmed set of experiences where “we may see our relationship with nature anew”.

Taking up the challenge of what it would mean to transform existing museums into spaces of social and climate justice, Zhang proposes turning the British Museum’s Great Court into an open forum for public debate on climate action. While such ideas may seem fantastical, BP or Not BP?’s intervention shows how this work is, in many senses, already underway.



Collecting worlds, making futures

While not all museums are burdened by the same colonial roots as the British Museum, the central premise of amassing natural and cultural objects to tell a particular story has shaped the way societies globally now understand their place in the world. In many instances, this has meant supporting, justifying and perpetuating certain ways of living that may have disastrous consequences for the environment.

In the early 20th century, the American Museum of Natural History sponsored a number of excursions to Africa to capture and kill animals for a series of new dioramas. The creatures – including lions, giraffes, elephants and gorillas – were stuffed and mounted to encourage their preservation “in the wild”. This led to the establishment of one of the first protected areas in Africa, Albert National Park in the eastern Congo, named after the King of Belgium. The park, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was renamed Virunga in 1969.

As recent studies have shown, such protected areas can create an unhelpful divide between local communities and the lands they inhabit. Indigenous voices and alternative systems of land management are often marginalised in this approach, which extends the frozen world of the museum diorama to living ecosystems. Both are symptomatic of a modern attitude towards the environment that represents a significant obstacle to meaningful climate action.

In their response to the competition brief, experimental spatial practice Design Earth concocted a playful yet provocative antidote to this situation – a magical realist story accompanied by speculative design drawings.

“Elephant in the Room” asks what would happen if one of the creatures shot by celebrated “conservationist” Teddy Roosevelt and subsequently mounted in the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History came to life and demanded justice. As the elephant rampages through the museum and out into the streets of New York, its belly “echoes with resonant demands to decolonise the museum” and “divest from carbon industries”. The museum itself becomes an architectural taxidermy, with only its facade remaining.



This striking image upends the familiar hierarchies of the museum. Stasis and order give way to chaos – but of a regenerative kind – with the elephant standing in for the Earth itself. The idea that humans exercise any kind of “mastery” over nature was always an illusion. Museums – “those symbols of elitism and staid immobility” as anthropologist James Clifford once put it – have helped to reinforce this view of the world for too long.

Reimagining museums as pillars in the fight against climate change means more than just paying lip service to issues of sustainability, recycling and carbon emissions (important as these are). It means a historical reckoning with the role museums have played in supporting the main drivers of climate breakdown – not least colonialism, capitalism (at least as we currently know it), and industrial modernity.

Climate action from this perspective is wrapped up with calls for social justice and racial equality. Museums have emerged as a key battleground in these wider debates, and it is crucial that we begin to connect the dots between the intersecting legacies of colonialism and climate change.

Museums and climate action

Climate action typically refers to a suite of activities that either look to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or enhance the way societies globally can adapt to the worst effects of climate change.

The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to ensure global average temperatures do not rise more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Current policies put the world on track for warming of around 3°C. As the journalist David Wallace-Wells writes in his searing book The Uninhabitable Earth, such a catastrophic rise would no doubt “shape everything we do on the planet, from agriculture to human migration to business and mental health”.

While museums around the world have implemented programmes of climate change education and pushed for more environmentally friendly practices, far less attention has been paid to building resilience or adapting to a rapidly changing climate. This echoes broader work across the heritage sector. As a recent report on climate action from the International Council on Monuments and Sites highlights, questions of adaptation and resilience in heritage tend to focus on learning from the past to guide contemporary planning.

The profound challenge of the climate emergency forces us to think more radically about what museums could and should be. What would a museum dedicated to meaningful climate action look like? How would it operate? Who would it serve, and what stories would it tell?

Despite a general claim to be working in the interests of “future generations”, museums and the heritage sector more broadly rarely consider the future in specific terms. Instead, present conditions and attitudes are simply projected into the future, as if change is something to be fought against rather than embraced. As a recent research project led by one of us concluded, there is an urgent need for more speculative and creative thinking in the field to confront the inevitable social and environmental transformations climate change will bring.

This was very much in the back of our minds when we were developing the competition. Alongside new initiatives such as the New York City based Climate Museum and Climate Museum UK, which aim to address the climate crisis directly, we hoped the brief might encourage applicants to consider climate resilience and adaptation in broader terms, or ask how a changing climate might prompt new ways of living with the Earth. In short, we invited submissions that might consider not only how we survive, but how we might thrive in the climate change era.

Living well in a warming world

Several of the proposals did just that. Weathering With Us, submitted by Singapore-based architects Isabella Ong and Tan Wen Jun, imagines a new kind of contemplative museum space where climate action is materialised in the very structure and experience of the building.

Their dreamlike concept – a huge floating barge situated where the equator intersects with the prime meridian at 0’ latitude and 0’ longitude – takes the form of a mandala sand sculpture made of olivine, a material which naturally pulls carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and redeposits it as carbon in the skeletons of marine creatures and shells in the ocean.

Our collective understanding of climate change is often represented by a doomsday clock. The museum put forward by Weathering With Us asks what would happen if “we have a shared emblem that functions not as a harbinger of doom, but of healing?”



If the monumental scale of Weathering With Us shows how the design of new museum buildings might rise to the challenge of climate action, other proposals gestured towards the practical work that museums perform in the world. In particular, a key theme running through many submissions was the possibility for museums to support new ways of living with and relating to the Earth.

Estimates on the number of museums in the world range from 55,000 to 95,000. The sheer diversity of the field is a reminder both of the malleability of the term “museum”, and of the globalised reach of an idea that has its roots in European colonialism and capitalist exploitation.

Existances - a project developed by a group of Brazilian academics and museum workers - simultaneously challenges these roots and asks “how we might live well” in the Anthropocene. Highlighting the power of collective knowledge in the fight against climate change, Existances (a neologism produced by bringing together the words “existence” and “resistance”) imagines a network of micro-museums embedded in and responding to the diverse cosmologies of Afro-Brasilian, Amerindian and rural communities. While acknowledging the severity of the climate emergency for such communities, this is a project of hope – one that challenges us to think and act together to imagine alternative ways of being in the world.



Without denying the scale of this task, a few key themes emerged in response to the competition that suggest what shape this reorientation might take.

The first relates to breaking down boundaries and moving away from authoritarian values of order and control. In an inevitably transforming future world, museums must accept and embrace the creative possibilities of uncertainty and change rather than work against these forces.

This will also mean reimagining the familiar structure of museums. Instead of centralised spaces and buildings, many of the proposals submitted to the competition called for non-hierarchical “networks” enabling a decentralised approach to collecting, education and research.

This would require a fundamental rethink of the way museums are typically governed - the third and perhaps most important theme to emerge across the competition entries. Certain crises demand new forms of decision making where experts and lay people can come together to imagine new futures.

It’s clear that 2020 has been a tumultuous year for museums. The pandemic has forced many around the world to close, and each week brings news of further staff redundancies. In the UK, museums have been drawn into a manufactured culture war with threats from the government that those institutions which remove statues or other contested objects from display risk losing their public funding. On top of all this, a battle has raged within the international museums sector over what the term “museum” even means. To say this is a sector in flux would be an understatement.

Museums will not solve the complex problem of climate change, but they might set a powerful example for how this work can unfold across society over the coming years. The ideas generated in response to our competition show how vibrant, collective and transformative museums could be. The climate crisis brings with it a sense of inevitable change, of things unravelling, but how society responds to this change is far from certain. An expanded notion of climate action is required, one that focuses on environmental justice, racial, social and economic inequalities and - perhaps most radically - new forms of living with the Earth.

As the Horniman proves, in dealing with complex legacies and ongoing injustices, museums have already become testing grounds for localised action on a broad range of social, political and economic issues. The position they take with regards to climate action could resonate far beyond the field.

Colin Sterling & Rodney Harrison, November 2020

Climate crisis: how museums could inspire radical action

Climate crisis

The Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project emerges from Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling's work on the AHRC Heritage Research programme. 

This research focused on the implications of posthumanism and the Anthropocene for the heritage field. Engaging with a diverse range of thinkers - including Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rosi Braidotti and Claire Colebrook - this two year project sought to understand how heritage might be reconceptualised through a more-than-human lens. 

Returning to some of the 'core concepts' of the heritage field, from care and stewardship to inheritance and memory, this research provided the foundation for thinking critically and creatively about the lingering anthropocentrism of most museum institutions. Many of the ideas developed through the RMCA competition picked up on this theme.

You can read more about this topic in these open access resources:

Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling (eds.) 2020. Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and After the Anthropocene. Open Humanities Press

Colin Sterling. 2020. 'Critical Heritage and the Posthumanities: Problems and Prospects'. International Journal of Heritage Studies 

Heritage in More-than-Human Worlds

Human rights can form the basis for transparent, effective and transformative public service.

This Guide explores how human rights are related to museums, and explores particular rights especially relevant to museums. These include many rights that relate to climate change, including the right to take part in environmental decision making, from the Aarhus Convention. The Guide can be accessed here.



Whether they realize it or not, museums, and indeed every individual who works in and with them, have duties to fulfil regarding human rights. In fact, every individual in society has duties to uphold the rights of others, just as they should expect to be able to attain their own rights.

If people are to exercise their rights and responsibilities, they need to know about them, care about them, understand how they relate to their lives and work, and to have effective, transparent institutions that fulfil their responsibilities and obligations.
However, for the most part, human rights are not even talked about in museums or in society. Few museums incorporate human rights perspectives into their planning or across their areas of activity, and the basis of museums’ decisions – their visions, missions, programming decisions and management – is often untransparent.


This Guide aims to support museums and museum workers to understand and fulfil their human rights duties with greater confidence, to use human rights as a basis for more effective public service, and to enable more people – whether as individuals, groups or communities – to be able to exercise their basic rights and freedoms through museums. It is not intended to be the last word on the subject, but to be a tool for empowerment.

Museums and Human Rights: using human rights as a basis of public service

How can museums use Disaster Risk Reduction approaches, to safeguard themselves, and enhance their contributions to the wider world?

This Guide was produced in 2019 to support museums and their partners to draw on Disaster Risk Reduction approaches as they 'reshape' and make decisions as they emerge from the pandemic. The Guide can be accessed here.



Disasters – crises, emergencies, damaging situations – come in many shapes and sizes. Reducing their occurrence and their impact is a key part of good management, and securing a future that is better than the present. Disaster Risk Reduction is not just about surviving disasters, but working to reduce the likelihood of disasters happening in the first place, being prepared for them when they hit, recovering from them as best you can, and coming out the other side stronger. Everyone can benefit from Disaster Risk Reduction approaches, and everyone can use them, in their own lives and in their work.

This Guide aims to help empower museums (small, large and of any kind, anywhere), museum workers, museum networks and their partners to draw on Disaster Risk Reduction approaches. This should help them reduce the impact of disasters, whether COVID-19, climate change, or any other kind of disaster, for the benefit of themselves, their communities, and the natural environment.


So, the Guide has two main goals:
To help museums build their resilience, and reduce the impact of disasters on museums themselves.
To help museums contribute to resilience-building in the wider world, for the benefit
of society and the natural environment.


Many museums already consider disaster risk in terms of protecting their own buildings and collections. This Guide takes a broader perspective, that museums can play a key role in supporting people, communities, the whole of society and nature, to prevent or mitigate disasters in the wider world. Making a difference in the world is, arguably, the best way for museums to be resilient as organizations.

The Guide aligns museum activities with the Ten Essentials of Resilience, an existing international framework for localising Disaster Risk Reduction, linked to the Sendai Framework. 

Climate change is presented as an example of how museums can contribute to climate action by aligning with the Ten Essentials of Resilience.

The Guide includes case studies on how museums are already embracing Disaster Risk Reduction. 

Museums and Disaster Risk Reduction: building resilience in museums, society and nature

How can museums help put the world on a path to a sustainable future, through working to support the Sustainable Development Goals?

'Museums and the Sustainable Development Goals: a how-to guide for museums, galleries, the cultural sector and their partners' was produced in 2019 to help museums and their partners to enhance their contributions to sustainable development, using the SDGs as a template.



Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals were agreed by the members of the United Nations in 2015 as a shared plan for people, planet and prosperity. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and their 169 targets are the blueprint for all sectors, and all countries, to work together in the common endeavour of securing a future that respects human rights, ensures people can lead lives in dignity, and in a safe and secure natural environment. Climate change is the subject of SDG 13, 'Take urgent climate action', but climate change relates to all of the SDGs: all SDGs are threatened by climate change, and climate action can support all 17 SDG and the overall agenda. This guide explores the SDGs and how museums can contribute towards them, using a framework of seven key activities: 

1. Protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage, both within museums and more generally
2. Support and provide learning opportunities in support of the SDGs
3. Enable cultural participation for all
4. Support sustainable tourism
5. Enable research in support of the SDGs
6. Direct internal leadership, management and operations to support the SDGs
7. Direct external leadership, collaboration and partnerships towards the SDGs

This framework is aligned with roughly 1/3 of all SDG targets. 

The SDGs are not just for governments: they are an invitation to all sectors of society, in all places, to collaborate and participate in the achievement of the 2030 Agenda. The SDGs are an incredible opportunity for anyone, any organisation, and any sector to collaborate in pursuit of common goals, levering their skills, capacities and unique resources. Museums have a great deal to offer this Agenda, and some of the SDGs will not be achieved without museums. This guide aims to help museums, and you, play your part. There is no single right way to contribute to the SDGs and, so long as the principles of sustainability are followed, no wrong way. The SDGs are also not about continuing with business as usual, but about clear, committed, focused action to enhance positive impacts and reduce negative impacts.

The SDGs are anchored in the principles of
1) protecting and promoting human rights and environmental rights, which underpin the possibility for dignity, peace and sustainable development;

2) equality, as reducing inequalities is essential for protecting and promoting human rights, and tackling discrimination and exclusion;
and 

3) sustainability, through a long-term perspective to accommodate intergenerational equity, justice and a world fit for present and future generations.

Importantly, the SDGs follow a principle of 4) ‘leave no-one behind’.



Why the SDGs need museums
The SDGs are a call to all sectors of society. They need museums’ involvement to succeed, as museums have unique resources and key roles to play.

1. Museums preserve cultural and natural heritage in the form of collections and associated knowledge. These form the basis of a wide range of learning and research programmes that can support the SDGs, and the preservation of cultural and natural heritage beyond museums.

2. Museums reach very large numbers of people for formal and informal learning, and already deliver many programmes that align with the SDGs. They foster many people’s interest in, concern for, and ability to address issues relating to the SDGs. Museums can play a crucial role in enhancing public education and participation with the SDGs.

3. Museums can support cultural participation. Cultural participation helps ensure that all people of all abilities, and from all backgrounds, have the opportunity to participate fully in society. As museums provide services for people, they can contribute to many SDGs by ensuring that their services consider and are accessible to the full breadth of society. Museums can bring people together, from similar backgrounds and interests, and from different backgrounds and interests, promoting fair, tolerant and just societies.

4. Museums are trusted by large numbers of people, and this trust can help further the SDG Agenda. Museums can support people to explore challenges relating to the SDGs, and to promote fair, tolerant and just societies. Trust enables us to go from the known to the unknown.

5. Museums can make a significant contribution to local economies, notably in areas of poverty or where particular groups of people are marginalised, helping address social and economic inequalities.

6. Museums make a significant impact through their operations and use of resources; they can make a direct contribution to the SDGs through their activities relating to personnel, finance and operations, enhancing positive impacts and steadily reducing negative impacts.

7. Museums can participate in, facilitate and initiate cross-sectoral partnerships and play a leading role in pursuit of the SDGs. Museums enjoy a great deal of freedom, and can use this freedom to support positive interactions between different stakeholder groups and to address real-world challenges (both local and global). In many societies, arguably no sector is better placed or better able to do this, helping bridge the gap between policy/strategy and people’s individual lived experience, and providing opportunities for people to input into the development of policies and strategies that affect the lives of them and others.

Why museums need the SDGs
The SDGs are a global framework, with increasingly strong buy-in from a wide
range of sectors, notably from funding agencies and governments. Museums can benefit from engaging with the SDGs. Connecting with the SDGs will help museums in the following ways:


1. Shape their programmes to provide people interested in social and environmental topics with educational and participatory activities.

2. Put their unique resources to good use in pursuit of positive social and environmental outcomes.

3. Play a significant and distinctive part in an ambitious global agenda.

4. Build partnerships and collaborations.

5. Create and demonstrate impact.

You can explore 'Museums and the Sustainable Development Goals' here.

Museums and the Sustainable Development Goals

Non-party stakeholder submission to the Talanoa Dialogue from the ‘International	Symposium on Climate Change and Museums’, Manchester (UK), April 2018, Henry McGhie, Manchester Museum

This submission was developed in response to a request from UN Climate Change for submissions as part of an initiative called the Talanoa Dialogue. This submission is based on discussions at the ‘International Symposium on Climate Change and Museums’, held at the University of Manchester (UK), April 2018. The full submission can be accessed here. Participants at the conference were an informal, open coalition of museums, museum workers, researchers, and representatives from related agencies (including UNFCCC and IPCC). The conference used the Talanoa process and spirit as a basis for presentations and discussions. We explored the three Talanoa questions in workshops: 'where are we now?', 'where are we trying to get to?' and 'how do we get there?'. This submission is based on those discussions, with additions based on further developments (e.g. museums’ involvement at SB48 in Bonn in May 2018).



Where are we?

Currently,

Museums enjoy a high level of public trust: higher in many cases (countries) than government, business, advertising or mass media. This trust can be put to good use to help people critically interrogate information on climate change they are presented in mass media or so-called fake news.

Museums can provide arenas for dialogue around climate change. They provide opportunities for people to come together and explore alternatives beyond their daily lives and experience, and to gain perspectives on other people, communities, places and sectors.

Museums can help people understand and explore the importance and impacts of climate change in a very wide range of heritage forms and sites– cultural, natural, in situ, ex situ.

Museums are extremely diverse in terms of their size and collections, presenting great potential for a rich exploration of a wide range of social and environmental impacts of climate change.

Museums have great freedom, and great ability to work with a very diverse set of stakeholders, connecting e.g. high-level policy work with people as individuals. They are able to work with e.g. UNFCCC, IPCC, and also with people as individuals and communities. Arguably, museums are able to bridge such differences more easily than any other kind of organisation.

Collections document the natural environment, enabling researchers to understand, manage and mitigate impacts of climate change.

Many museums and museum workers are interested in connecting with climate action, but are in need of support to build knowledge, confidence and networks.

There are some excellent, and growing, networks of museums interested in contributing to the climate challenge.

Museums are key sites for formal and informal education on a wide range of topics, including Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine, citizenship, Traditional and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, arts, sciences, humanities, craft, military history and many more topics.

Many museums have large environmental impacts themselves in the ways they run their buildings or in their operations.

Museums have a key role in addressing a number of key policies and strategies, including Article 12 of the Paris Agreement (Action for Climate Empowerment), and a number of Sustainable Development Goal targets, notably:

4.7 By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.

11.4 Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage.

12.8 By 2030, ensure that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature.

13.1 Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries.

13.2 Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning.

13.3 Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning.

17.16 Enhance the global partnership for sustainable development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries, in particular developing countries

Progress made in terms of ‘where are we?’

Increasing numbers of museums feature climate change in their activities (exhibitions, events, research on collections) and decision-making (see https://mccnetwork.org/exhibitions/)

Museums’ work around climate change and sustainability is often not very obvious to the public or other sectors. We want to talk more effectively about what has been, can be and and will be done.

Museums have come a long way even since the signing of the Paris Agreement and the establishment of the SDGs, and there is a long way to go yet.

A growing number of networks are strengthening museums’ contributions towards climate change education and action, for example:

The Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice has nearly 900 members and participants. It mobilises and supports Canadian museum workers and their organizations in building public awareness, mitigation and resilience in the face of climate change.

‘We Are Still In’ is the largest coalition, worldwide, of subnational supporters of the Paris Agreement. The US-based voluntary association has a growing Cultural Institutions sector that engages museums and museum associations in support of UNSDGs.

The Museums and Climate Change Network is an international community of interest, with 50 members.

There are a large number of local and national networks and communities of interest that are working to support museums’ contribution towards a sustainable future.

Museums have presented at UNFCCC Dialogues on Action for Climate Empowerment (2017) and at a one-day workshop to advance ACE in May 2018. Museums have been formally recognised by UNFCCC as key actors in climate education and empowerment (see https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/l03a2.pdf). Collaboration with UNFCCC has been very constructive.

International networks of science museums have acknowledged the part that they have to play in advancing climate action and the wider sustainability agenda, through, for example, the devleopment of the Tokyo Protocol, which was formally launched at the Science Centre World Summit, in Tokyo in November 2017. The Summit was entitled ‘Connecting the World for a Sustainable Future’. The Tokyo Protocol (https://scws2017.org/tokyo_protocol/) is ‘on the role of science centres and science museums worldwide in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals’. The Protocol acknowledged that nearly 3,000 science centres and museums influence over 310 million visitors each year, worldwide. The Protocol has yet to be adopted widely or consistently.

The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Natural History (a standing committee of the International Council of Museums), with 400 individual and institutional members, has a working group exploring how museums with natural history collections can explore the concept of the Anthropocene “to stimulate a vital conversation of how museums, as unique resources in a civil society, can best champion a cause of unprecedented urgency – namely, the future of Planet Earth and all of its life.”

Existing collections will need to be developed in order to enable specialists to use them to explore a changing natural environment.

Quantitative impact in terms of ‘where are we?”

In terms of the wider museums sector and climate change:

Museums and museum networks have participated in two UNFCCC events and the Global Action Summit 2018.

Recognition of the key role museums have to play was recognised in 2018 by UNFCCC, and will be incorporated into Article 12, Action for Climate Empowerment.

At least three networks for museums working with climate change have been established (Canada, US and international).

At least four conferences recently organised to support museums connect with climate change (Workshop on the Anthropocene (Pittsburgh), Climate Change Communication and Climate Change in Museums in Manchester, Science Centre World Summit in Tokyo).

The Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice has organized and delivered special climate change sessions at six provincial and national museum conferences, as well as developed a peer learning circle among museum educators.

In the US, 26 museums are signatories to the ‘We Are Still In’ initiative

Environmental reporting has been incorpporated into museums’ funding requirements in a number of countries (including the UK, Japan and Australia).

Museums dedicated to climate change have been developed in Hong Kong (Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, 2013), Bremerhaven (Germany, Klimahaus 8° Ost 2013), Low carbon science and Technology Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and another is due to open in Oslo (Klimahuset, opens 2019). Other museums dedicated to wider sustainability issues include the award-winning Museo de Amanã (Museum of Tomorrow) in Rio de Janeiro (2015). Many other museums worldwide support an understanding of the impacts and importance of climate change; for example, in China, large energy enterprises have their own museums, to popularize energy and environmental protection knowledge, and new museums are being developed in industrialised provinces.

The Climate Museum (founded in 2015) is preparing to launch a museum in New York, and has held exhibitions. A mobile museum dedicated to climate change (ClimateMuseumUK) was launched in the UK in 2018.

Many museum have staged exhibitions dedicated to climate change, and many more have staged exhibitions that connect with climate change in more or less overt ways (see https://mccnetwork.org/exhibitions/)

Museums who are connecting their work with climate change are currently engaging millions of people with the subject worldwide. Many more are already engaging millions with climate change information and action in some form more without even realizing it.

At least six books have been published to help museum workers connect with climate change.

Julie’s Bicycle’s ‘Creative Climate Leadership’ course has supported 50 cultural leaders (36 UK, 24 elsewhere) working with climate change in some way.

Where do we want to go?

The world needs museums that provide cultural frameworks to identify and challenge the myths and misperceptions that threaten all of us. Public dialogue and participation in imagining and creating positive futures is much needed, as are effective multistakeholder partnerships. Museums are also essential research resources for the understanding, appreciation and conservation of cultural and biological diversity, in a rapidly changing world.

Our vision is of a near future where museums are contributing as constructively and effectively as possible to meeting the many challenges posed by climate change, and wider sustainability issues. We recognise that we have a unique part to play, drawing on collections and working with people as individuals, groups and communities, and that only by working openly and with others will we be able to succeed. We also recognise that we have a responsibility to do so. We want to support one another, other museums and other sectors, to support the achievement of this vision.



In this near future,

Museums provide visitors and other users with the support that they want and require to make the positive changes that they want to make, supporting constructive thinking, feeling and doing.

Museum match challenge with support.

Museums are not ‘only’ providers of expert opinion, but facilitators, catalysts and platforms.

Conversations and partnerships happen at all levels, locally, nationally and internationally.

Museums are part of a resilient network of institutions and organisations that support people’s ongoing understanding and appreciation of the past, present and future in the context of a rapidly changing world.

The museum sector speaks with both one voice, and many voices

Museums support the transition towards green energy sources and sustainable society.

Communities and societies recognise museums’ role in facilitating and supporting a fair and equitable society.

How do we get there?

To begin to achieve this vision, we commit to:

AMBITION

Focus where possible on leading around climate change and sustainability, rather than reacting.

Work with high aspiration and awareness.

Consider the positive and negative impacts of our activities, reducing unnecessary negative impacts where possible.

INCLUSION, DIVERSITY AND COLLABORATION

Be part of a global story of partners, individuals and communities, exploring pasts, presents and futures.

Become a global network of co-ordinated collaborators, supporting relevant international events (e.g. World Environment Day), and collaborating on a global Climate Conversations Day.

Join and strengthen cross-sector alliances that can scale-up change, working for common purpose with UNFCCC, IPCC and many others, locally and globally.

Place less emphasis on polished finished products, and more emphasis on using museums to facilitate constructive change as a work in progress.

Support one another, and others in museums and other sectors, as we work towards the goal of meeting the climate challenge.

Invite others to join us.

Be listeners and facilitators rather than solely providers of information.

Work in interdisciplinary ways wherever possible.

CARE AND ATTENTION: CONNECTING WITH THE BIG PICTURE, AND THE PERSONAL

Considering our work in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals, and promoting an understanding of the goals locally and globally.

Participate in and support holistic, connected thinking.

Supporting wellbeing of individuals, communities and the environment.

IMAGINATION

Doing things that work, trying things out, expanding our own and others’ range of possibilities: not just doing things as they have been done before.

Work with imagination to explore pasts, presents and possible futures, locally and globally.

FOCUS ON RESULTS

Work to raise visitors’ and other users’ awareness of local and global issues and their links to their everyday lives and experiences, focussing on solutions rather than problems, and promoting empathy for those with little or no voice.

Recognise that information alone does not necessarily inspire or achieve action. We will pay attention to the needs of visitors, researchers and other users, and provide them with the support, information, encouragement and sign-posting that they need to make and take positive steps.

Recognise that museums evoke awe and wonder, feelings have been found to be particularly important in connecting information with action. Inspiration is the feeling that moves us to action.

Working to reduce our own emissions where possible.

SELF-DEVELOPMENT

Draw on, and develop, our resources – people, collections, facilities – to understand and address the many challenges posed by climate change.

Draw on latest research, in science, social sciences and more, and support others to do the same.



Collaboration models to support the achievement of this vision

Working with UNFCCC in 2017 and 2018 has been extremely positive, and has helped lead to the recognition of the role of museums in Article 12 of the Paris Agreement. This is a foundation that we want to build on.

Open models of collaboration through peer-support and online platforms have been extremely supportive.

The learning outcomes for Education for Sustainable Development developed by UNESCO and UNFCCC are a useful template for museums to use, as are the SDGs.

We wish to work with other sectors and agencies (e.g. IPCC, UNFCCC, other relevant UN agencies, as well as more local partners) to support work that aligns with the above vision, and to promote their work for mutual, collective and public benefit.

Securing funding through, e.g. Global Challenges Research Fund, connecting with research grant-holders whose work connects with climate change and wider sustainability, creating opportunities through funding schemes based on academic–non-academic collaboration, and securing funding for networks rather than individual organisations, will help this work.

An initiative, ‘Museum partnerships for future earth’, has been registered on the UN SDG online platform. This is available to promote the work of museums and related networks.

Greater connection and online platforms to simply demonstrate existing collective impacts of museums, with opportunities for new partners to join in, would be very supportive.

Through these actions:

More, and more kinds of, people will be engaged with the sustainable development agenda constructively.

More, and more kinds of, people will have had the opportunity to connect with, and in some cases influence, policies and strategies that will impact on their lives, imagining, constructing and designing the future that they want.

Community cohesion and social inclusion will have been supported, by addressing both immediate, local challenges presented by climate change, and by connecting local and global dimensions.

Researchers will be able to use material culture to support the understanding and management of cultural and natural heritage in an ongoing way.

New solutions will be stronger and longer-lasting because they embrace collective, interdisciplinary and synergistic design.

Multilevel partnerships will have created new, unforeseen opportunities to support the move towards a more sustainable future.

Society, the natural environment, and museums themselves will be more resilient and resistent to shocks.

Public funding will have been used to support the public good.

We will be able to say in 2030 that we did what we could in support of the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement.

Museums will be more relevant, more trusted and more effective.

Talanoa Dialogue: Climate Change and Museums

As part of the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action design and ideas competition, we invited members of the  jury to speak on some of the main issues currently facing the museum field as it seeks to address the challenges of a warming world. 

You can view an interview with Dr. Jenny Newell of the Australian Museum here. 

Interview with Dr. Jenny Newell

This year, Glasgow (Scotland) will be the venue for the COP, the United Nations climate change conference. But what is this, what has it got to museums, and what can museums do?



The COP is not a typical conference, it is primarily a political event. COP stands for the Conference of the Parties, where Parties are the countries that are signed up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, one of the three Rio Conventions developed from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Signatories of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC for short, committed to meet each year to monitor progress and work to ensure the ambitions of the Convention are being achieved.

The first meeting, or COP1, was held in Berlin in 1995. Since then, the meeting has been held around the world. Notable developments were the Kyoto Protocol, from COP3 in 1997, and the Paris Agreement from COP21 in 2015. What has this got to do with museums?

The original Framework Convention included a section, Article 6, on the importance of public education, training of staff, public awareness, public participation, public access to information and international cooperation on climate change matters. Governments agreed to the importance of this and to develop programmes to support it.

However, for the most part those commitments haven’t been honoured particularly well. But, let us not despair. As with other Conventions, participation is voluntary. That means, surely, that other sectors that have something to contribute pick up the bat and do what they can.

What kind of organizations could support public education, awareness, participation and access to information on climate change? Schools, libraries and museums are obvious candidates.

Many museums have been working to do their bit, and museum perspectives have featured at a number of UN conferences, to highlight their potential to support the aims of the Framework Convention and Paris Agreement. As a result, Parties to the Paris Agreement formally recognized the key role that a range of sectors – including museums – play in supporting this aspect of the Paris Agreement.

At the same time, the museum sector has increasingly come to recognize the importance of incorporating sustainability perspectives into its activities, notably with the adoption of a resolution on sustainability that was adopted by the International Council of Museums in 2019.

All eyes are on Glasgow to see what countries come up with in terms of actions to address climate change. At the same time, let us not forget that action is really needed at local levels. Rather than put our futures solely in the hands of politicians, museums can help people to:

explore the futures they want,

understand why climate change is important in terms of how it affects those futures,

foster a culture for peace, tolerance and non-violence, and

empower people to take part in public affairs and to hold their politicians accountable for their decisions.

It is important that museums use the 50 weeks of the year that aren’t the time of COP to advance support and activity to address climate change at the same time as addressing other sustainability challenges. What can they do? Easy, do what they do best and relate it to climate change, incorporating climate change into interpretation of collections, education programmes, as well as walking the walk by addressing their own climate footprint, making sure all museum decisions are taken with climate change and sustainability considerations in mind, and work with local and global partners. Multilateralism isn’t only for governments, but for museums too.

This article is adapted from a blog post on the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice website, January 2021.

Evolving Climate Change Policy and Museums

COP26 will be held in Glasgow from 31 October - 12 November, but what is a COP, and why is it important? From the 1970s onwards, there was growing recognition that human demands on the environment – or rather, our economic approach to the environment – were beyond the environment’s limits. A series of high-level conferences and reports through the ’70s and ’80s identified a growing need for international co-operation to address this situation. This resulted in the so-called Rio Earth Summit of 1992, where the member countries of the United Nations sought to agree on a new path.

The Summit resulted in three conventions, which are binding treaties under international law. The best known is the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); the least known is the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The third convention is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Convention – as with many international agreements – is not a huge weighty volume, it is a mere 25 pages long. Its ultimate objective is “to achieve ... stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”

Among the commitments that signatory countries made was to meet annually to monitor progress and agree on further programmes of activity to achieve the goal of the convention. Their meetings are called ‘COP’, meaning ‘Conference of the Parties’. COP26 is the 26th meeting, since the first one in 1995. Notable COPs were COP3, where the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, and COP21, where the Paris Agreement was negotiated. Each of these are further steps to try to address the great, many-headed challenge of climate change.

I have been working on climate change and museums for 20-odd years, and on sustainability topics throughout my career, first as an ecologist, then as a museum curator and manager. I became very focussed on how museums can contribute to sustainable development agendas. Why? Because museums have a lot to offer these agendas. Collections are knowledge and inspiration resources that can further public education and awareness, and research. They can support public participation in decision making and shaping policies and facilitate cross-sector working involving the public, specialists and policy makers. In a society with limited civic space, places where people come together, such as museums and libraries, can play important roles as information hubs, and places where people share their own views, concerns and ideas about the world and the future. The need for these kind of spaces is already recognised in the world of climate action. The UNFCCC includes a specific article on the importance of public education, awareness, training of staff, public access to information, public participation and international co-operation on climate change matters.

You can read the full blog on the Churchill Fellowship site

COP26, climate action and cultural institutions

Henry McGhie of Curating Tomorrow discusses the impacts of climate change and the need for urgent climate action with Asher Minns (Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research) and Tempa Gyaltsen (Environment and Development at the Tibet Policy Institute). Part of a series of conversations exploring heritage, museums and climate change as part of the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project.




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