Culture Uniting to Imagine & Realise Low Carbon, Just, Climate Resilient Futures
Description
Contemporary climate planning has so far failed to keep 1.5 alive or deliver transformative adaptation, especially for the most vulnerability communities. One basic reason: current climate planning doesn’t dare to dream. It fails to help people imagine practical, desirable low carbon, just, climate resilient futures. It relies too heavily on technocratic solutions at the expense of place-based, people-centered, rights-based and demand side strategies. It favors voices from institutions that have helped cause the climate crisis and excludes those best positioned to critique them.
Arts, culture- and heritage-based approaches can flip this paradigm. ArtCulureHeritageCOP27 is an extraordinary day-long convening of those committed to making this happen, held during COP27 and one of the Sinai’s premier cultural institutions.
#ArtCultureHeritageCOP27 will highlight how culture-based strategies can transform climate planning, policy and action. Traditional knowledge, buildings, and landscapes that pre-date the fossil fuel era can point the way to post-carbon living. The worldviews held by Indigenous Peoples and local communities never co-opted by modern take-make-waste approaches offer counterpoints to unsustainable paradigms of ‘progress.’ Artistic, heritage, creative, and imaginative tools support transformative reinterpretation of inherited mindsets, including the carbonscapes and petrocultures which are the heritage of the Anthropocene.
In addition to speaking across sectors to climate leaders and policy makers, #ArtCultureHeritageCOP27 will also be an important gathering of culture leaders and thinkers. The culture world is spread across genres and typologies including fines arts, performing arts, digital and creative industries, heritage and archaeology, libraries and archives, and traditional and Indigenous knowledge holders. Independent artists, loose collectives, creative industries, cultural institutions and public bodies all play a role. This event will put diverse cultural voices and leaders from every continent into dialogue with each other about how they can leverage each other’s strengths to deepen and expand the scale and scope of culture-based climate action.
#ArtCultureHeritageCOP27 will feature
Ø A CultureCOPAssembly that will bring together an incredibly diverse array of cultural actors and voices to explore how arts and culture at COPs can support, challenge and deepen the possibility of a more climate just and safe world for all.
Ø Cultural networks, institutions and operators assembled via the Climate Heritage Network speaking to how cultural infrastructure can be climate action infrastructure.
Ø Examples of cultural-based climate action, tied to COP initiatives like Action for Climate Empowerment and the Race to Resilience.
Ø Performances, music and poetry amplifying leading global creative voices on the climate emergency.
The event is being held under the patronage of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities with the support of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). During the day, the programme will feature panels, assemblies and breakouts. In the evening, the grounds of the Sharm el-Sheikh Museum will have a festival feel, showcasing the power of culture to bring people together for transformative climate action.
Venue
Sharm el-Sheik Museum
Contact
Andrew Potts - andrew.potts@climateheritage.org
