'Climate Change: Perspectives from the Arts and Humanities'

“Art and Climate Change: A Post-Cop26 Roundtable Discussion”

Why are the arts and humanities important for society? What kind of knowledge do they create, capture and captivate, and why is this important in thinking through ways of addressing our current planetary predicament?

In the months leading up to Cop26 in Glasgow in November 2021 it was anticipated by many commentators that much of the focus would revolve around devising political accords and policy agreements between key actors, sectoral interest groups and representatives of nation states. Notwithstanding important questions that would emerge in relation to which nations and sectors would be able to even attend the meeting, it also became increasingly clear that the role of culture in addressing the planetary emergency was going to be another notable absence in the discussions in Glasgow.[1]

Most of the debates surrounding the meeting were indeed led by political leaders, informed by scientific communities, and were primarily focused on progressing international agreements and multilateral policies to address the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises. If, however, cultural vitality in its broadest sense is recognised and acknowledged as the fourth pillar of sustainability, then any policy initiatives in relation to environmental change that fail to take into account the importance of the cultural realm will only have very limited success in the future.[2] Culture was recognised as the fourth pillar of sustainable development in 2010[3], to be added alongside the economic, social and environmental pillars as originally formulated by the United Nations, but since that time the cultural pillar has all too often fallen off the international agenda and has remained largely invisible in policy documents on sustainability at all levels nationally and internationally.[4]

While a recent announcement on Creative Climate Action in Ireland is to be welcomed (with 14 projects funded for completion by December 2022), the role that culture and the arts play more broadly is still largely siphoned off into sub-categories of limited funding streams via state bodies such as Culture Ireland, and is still not centrally placed and funded as a core infrastructure and key resource in terms of climate action planning, policy and public engagement in Ireland today.[5] A perfect example of this is how a word search of ‘culture’ in the Irish Government’s Climate Action Plan 2021: Securing our Future (4 November 2021) shows no entry for ‘culture’ but has 94 entries in a 208 page document in which ‘culture’ is found in terms of ‘agriculture’, ‘aquaculture’ and ‘horticulture’. Similarly, ‘arts’ as a term is found 5 times but all in relation to the word ‘parts’.[6] The arts and humanities’ perspectives are thus absented from core national policy, with ‘culture’ as the fourth sustainable pillar nowhere to be seen in the Irish government’s Climate Action Plan 2021.

On 25 November 2021 Future Earth Ireland and the Moore Institute at NUI Galway co-hosted a roundtable discussion to address this important gap in relation to the role that the arts, humanities and culture more widely, play in addressing  environmental and planetary challenges today. The webinar foregrounded the role of arts practitioners to listen the experiences of those working directly in the field, and to learn more about how different kinds of practices create different kinds of knowledges that can offer new pathways to address the climate and biodiversity crises in this pivotal decade.

We were reminded in the webinar how the arts and humanities can help us to see things differently and help us to emotionally connect, intellectually process and cognitively understand the magnitude of the ‘hyperobjects’ that are climate change and mass biodiversity loss.[7]

 As CEO of Julie’s Bicycle[8] Alison Tickell stated, “No amount of data, science, or technology can ever make us feel the world in the same way as art can”.[9] We were delighted that a wide range of artists, writers, scholars, practitioners, curators, and those involved in sustainability policy, accepted our invitation to participate where a wide range of view and thoughts on such issues expertise in Irish and international contexts were discussed.[10]