COP27 Key Issues
A Guide to the Cultural Dimensions
Cultural action has always thrived in the streets, halls, and galleries surrounding the COPs. Artistic performances and cultural interventions educate, inspire, and activate people locally and around the world
While cultural climate action has flourished in the streets, it often is nearly invisible in the COP “Blue Zone” where diplomats make policy and negotiate the decisions taken by national governments at COP plenaries. Cultural inputs can also be in short supply in the deliberations of the subsidiary bodies, mechanisms, working group and task forces created within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that typically meet in the margins of the COPs.
To help cultural actors engage with this complex agenda, the Climate Heritage Network has prepared this COP27 Key Issues: A Guide to the Cultural Dimensions. Whether you are in direct communication with national government COP delegation or simply trying to make local climate-culture programming more policy relevant, this Issue Guide can help. A companion set of open-source, digital “issue cards” is designed to support richer engagement by all cultural actors and operators in the online COP debate.
Working together, the members of the Climate Heritage Network believe that cultural voices can transform climate policy and science by using culture and heritage to embed into policy design social imaginaries of low carbon, just, climate resilient futures. Taking account of culture in climate policy will both improve the efficacy of climate planning and action itself, and also support local arts, cultural, and heritage voices working on the ground by helping to deliver policy and funding frameworks that valorise their work. Through this work, the CHN also aims to encourage attention to climate justice in both climate action and cultural practice.
Read more about the Climate Heritage Network’s Theory of Change on how culture from arts to heritage can bolster a system of climate planning and policy that is currently failing to deliver on the promise of the Paris Agreement in the CHN’s 2022-24 Action Plan.
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Adaptation and Resilience
Mainstreaming culture into national adaptation communications, policies, and measurements.
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Article 6 Carbon Markets/Non-Market Response Measurers
Incorporating cultural heritage in the ongoing conversation about safeguarding into environmental integrity principles.
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Buildings and Infrastructure
Engaging with global building organizations to shift from a build-first mindset and understand true sustainability in the built environment.
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Climate Impacts
Addressing climate change impacts on cultural and natural heritage and promoting science-based, community-led, values-driven climate vulnerability assessments for heritage places.
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Education, Training and Public Awareness
Engaging with the new 10-year ‘Glasgow work programme on Action for Climate Empowerment’ adopted at COP26 regarding climate education, training, and public awareness.
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Food and Agriculture
Supporting agroecology and building a connection to the UN’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems.
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Just Transition
Incorporating the potentials offered by cultural heritage and the creative industries into work of the Katowice Committee of Experts on the Impacts of the Implementation of Response Measures and other mechanisms.
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Loss and Damage, Migration, Displacement, and Human Mobility
Providing culture inputs into global discussions to avert, minimize and address loss and damage associated with the adverse impacts of climate change, with an emphasis on non-economic loss and damage.
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Tourism
Engaging with tourism stakeholders to emphasise sustainable tourism approaches that allow cultural destinations to generate positive economic and social benefits for local communities while reducing tourism’s carbon footprint.
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Waste and Consumption
Advancing the integration of arts, culture and heritage into circular economy policies and practice at a global scale.
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Women and Gender
Incorporating cultural institutions and actors to ensure the further strengthening and continuance of the UNFCCC Gender Action Plan (GAP) to deliver successful gender-responsive policy and action, both internationally and at national levels.
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Youth
Creating synergies with other youth-oriented organizations and fostering intergenerational dialogues where young people have the opportunity to speak with people of other generations about climate impacts.