Engaging with the UN’s Action for Climate Empowerment programme to mainstream arts, culture and heritage into climate education, training, and public awareness.

The term ACE or “Action for Climate Empowerment” refers to a global effort recognised in international climate policy to empower all members of society to engage in climate action, through education, training, public awareness, public participation, public access to information, and international cooperation on these issues. This work plays a key role in promoting the changes in lifestyles, attitudes and behaviours needed to foster low-emission, climate resilient and sustainable development. ACE doctrine reaffirms the role that cultural institutions, museums, youth, women and Indigenous Peoples play in ACE, but existing cultural infrastructures are currently not well integrated into ACE delivery.

Culture, from arts to heritage, play a key role in the work of ACE. Culture and heritage help define the way people encounter each other, constraining or facilitating efforts to reach the whole of society irrespectively of age, wealth, education and background. Our climate and environmental consciousness have been shaped by songs and rituals that remind us of the cycle of the seasons, by the rediscovery of nature-based creativity embedded in traditional crafts, by a change of perspective provoked by a movie, a book or a visit to a museum that has sensitized us about the importance of preserving nature and the ecosystems.

Culture reflects and influences or social behaviour and thus our consumption patterns, mediating our relationship to the environment, and fostering openness towards the importance to preserve cultural diversity for humankind. The wisdom embedded in cultural heritage and traditional knowledge that pre-dates the era when fossil fuel combustion and extractive land-use change have underpinned economic development, can point the way to post-carbon living at scale.

Climate Heritage Policy Priorities: (1) Better understand and underline the many intersections between the culture from arts to heritage and the goal of Action for Climate Empowerment, in relation to the four priority areas of the Glasgow work programme - policy coherence, coordinated action, tools and support, and monitoring, evaluation and reporting; (2) Mainstream culture from arts to heritage into the elaboration of the new Glasgow work programme on Action for Climate Empowerment launched at COP26 and under discussion at COP27, including by organising an event/dialogue for the next Dialogues on Action for Climate Empowerment to be held in Bonn, Germany on June 2023. Sensitize cultural operators and institutions to play a more conscious and ad active role in the fulfilling the ACE goals.