The Climate Heritage Network will:

Be a voluntary membership organization made up of local and city, state/provincial and regional, indigenous and tribal, and national arts, culture and heritage governmental and quasi-governmental boards, offices, ministries and site management agencies as well as NGOs, universities, businesses and other organizations. 

  • Initially be an electronic/digital network but may grow into to a more multifaceted effort.
  • Seek funding for its work while initially asking members to provide in-kind services like web hosting, social media, and design services.
  • Emphasize aiding heritage actors to be full partners in the design, planning, and execution of their communities’ climate action strategies, and linking together innovative initiatives like California’s new Cultural Resources Climate Change Task Force.
  • Serve as a vehicle for supporting engagement by the heritage sector in other international climate platforms like the UNFCCC’s Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action

Network Topics Can Include:

  • How arts, culture and heritage actors can inform climate policies and help jurisdictions meet their GHG reduction goals including through sustainable consumption and production patterns; clean energy; and land use and resource efficiency.
  • Supporting arts, culture and heritage offices and agencies to understand their role in deep decarbonization pathway planning, including the role of reducing the carbon footprint of the historic built environment, in line with the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the rise in global temperature well below 2°C of warming. Addressing real and perceived tensions between heritage conservation standards and climate mitigation and adaptation efforts and showcasing win-win solutions.
  • Scaling innovative policy solutions: replicating and spreading better practices and new approaches to arts, culture and heritage that activate cultural heritage-based climate action, communication and education strategies.
  • Connecting arts, culture and heritage actors at the local, regional and national levels to climate change experts and government peers around the world. Supporting climate change engagement by cultural heritage officials and promoting climate solidarity with arts, culture and heritage offices and agencies in frontline and underserved communities.
  • Providing opportunities for members to learn from one another, raising awareness of what has and hasn’t worked in different parts of the world.
  • Facilitating participation by arts, culture and heritage leaders in regional and international forums, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meetings and other UNFCCC platforms as well as global professional efforts.
  • Emphasising the role of arts, culture and heritage actors in promoting integrated nature-culture approaches that highlight the linkages between the ecological and social values and functions of land and other natural resources, and the connections between production and consumption, in ways that promote low carbon, healthy lifestyles in harmony with nature.
  • Sharing best practices in modeling and assessment to understand projected climate impacts, especially at the regional and local scale, and better practices in integrating these findings into planning and investment at all levels.
  • Building metrics and indicators that can help to track progress in reducing GhG emissions and the risk of climate change to communities and their cultural and heritage systems.
  • Sharing innovative models for financing and supporting climate adaptation, including public-private partnerships, resilience funds, and competitive approaches.

The Paris Agreement and Cultural Heritage

The Paris Agreement represents a global consensus on how to move forward on climate action.  It signals the turning point in the road to a low-carbon economy. Cultural heritage offers enormous potential for helping communities make these moves and achieve their climate targets. The Paris Agreement recognizes this when it calls out the power of landscapes to reduce climate change and affirms the important role that ecosystems, traditional knowledge, and sustainable land use can play in climate action.

The imperative of culture and heritage in resilience is given even more explicit recognition in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (and in SDG 11.4 in particular) as well as in the New Urban Agenda and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.  The heritage concepts embodied in these charters fill important gaps in climate mitigation and adaptation knowledge.

This intersection of arts, culture and heritage with resilience and climate sciences includes, for example, the relationship between the historic built environment and GhG mitigation including how promoting the reuse of existing buildings and the sensitive retrofitting of older and historic buildings for energy efficiency are decarbonization pathways. It underscores the important role heritage plays in enhancing adaptive capacity and reducing the vulnerability of communities, from building social cohesion to guiding resilience planning. It reveals heritage as a vector for climate communication, science and research. And, increasingly, it speaks to the issue of loss and destruction from climate impacts, including assessing and managing risk to community and cultural heritage values and aiding in planned relocation and climate mobility.

Role of Cities, Regions, Local Authorities, Indigenous Peoples and Other Non-state actors

The Paris Agreement recognizes the role of non-Party (i.e. non national government) stakeholders in addressing climate change, including indigenous peoples, cities and regions, civil society, the private sector and others.  The result has been the development of a series of key networks and platforms designed to leverage this potential. Organizations like the Under 2 Coalition and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy are committed to supporting delivery of the Paris Agreement and keeping global temperature rises to below 2 degrees Celsius. While virtually all of the jurisdictions participating in these networks have culture and heritage offices, many of these offices are not yet fully engaged in climate action.