Adapting our culture

Throughout history, societies have adapted to the local conditions of their physical environments, but the pace of climate change will create new challenges and opportunities for cultural organisations. To be socially, environmentally and financially resilient to a warmer, wetter and wilder climate, culture must adapt.

Well planned, early adaptation action saves money now and lives later. Cultural Adaptations seeks to develop the knowledge and the skills that cultural organisations and policy makers need to adapt their work.

 

Resources Conference

Why adapt Culture?

Cultural organisations need to recognise the risk that climate change poses to how we work, where we work, and who we work with. We need to anticipate the effects, prevent damage and take advantage of the opportunities which might arise.

The cultural sector is unique in society: it consists almost entirely of SMEs, with a huge public audience, and a huge variance of activity, typically funded through grant-giving bodies. As a result of climate change, the culture sector can expect logistics disruption, increasing travel and resource costs, altered audience accessibility and greater health & safety concerns and more: all which lead to financial and reputational cost for an organisation, programme or event.

Through the Cultural Adaptations action research project, we are exploring how cultural organisations can plan for our changed future, and developing free resources and toolkits to support this transformation.

What will Cultural Adaptations produce?

  • 4 workshops on the skills and knowledge cultural organisations need to adapt
  • 1 international conference for adaptation and cultural researchers, practitioners and policy makers
  • 1 digital resource and toolkit to enable and support cultural organisations to adapt to climate change impacts

Cultural Adaptations is creating and collecting research, evidence, articles, blogs, videos and case studies from around the world to inform how our culture can adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Who are these resources for?
All these resources are aimed at those working within cultural organisations: running shows, buildings, programmes, events, exhibitions and creating the cultural life of city regions in Europe, and around the world. This includes cultural organisers, policy makers and individual practitioners.

What are the resources?
Resources are free-to-access written, video or audio materials. They concentrate on increasing the awareness, knowledge and skills of cultural organisations.

Example resources