Webinar on Mobilising Arts, Culture: An Introduction to the Climate Heritage Network Madrid-to-Glasgow Climate Action Plan

Speakers: Hannah, Andrew Potts, Matt

Hannah: Today, we are very lucky to have Andrew Potts with us who is the coordinator of climate change and cultural heritage programmes for ICOMOS, and I think it's fair to say the driving force behind the Climate Heritage Network, which those of you that have had previous presentations might have heard a few things about. It's also extremely exciting. This is the first in our series of the climate heritage mobilisation webinars that we are hosting in partnership with the Climate Heritage Network. And we are going to be taking, in this in this webinar, a very quick overview of the activities that the Climate Heritage Network is undertaking and has been undertaking this past year in preparation for the COP 26 meeting that was due to be happening around now but is now postponed until next year. So, Andrew and I will be talking you through some of these activities and taking some questions at the end about some of that work, so please do, as Matt said, put your questions in the chat room there, Andrew over to you.

Andrew: Well, thank you very much, Hannah, for that introduction and thank you also to Historic England for the work that it is doing to put climate change at the forefront of the culture agenda. Thanks too and welcome to all the people joining this webinar. As you heard my name is Andrew Potts and I work at ICOMOS the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which is an international NGO devoted to safeguarding of cultural heritage. ICOMOS also has the pleasure of serving as the Secretariat for the Climate Heritage Network and I help ICOMOS with that work as well, and this webinar series as you heard from Hannah is a partnership between the Climate Heritage Network and Historic England. I can actually see in the chat that a number of folks from institutions that are members of the Climate Heritage Network have dialled in and let me welcome them as well. So most of you have just met me now for 20 seconds and I hope you won't think it's overly sentimental of me if I share with you the fact that I'm actually quite moved that this webinar series is happening. I mean, I know on the one hand this is just one in a seemingly endless series of COVID era zoom calls, but on the other hand this webinar series is indicative of something that's actually quite important, or I'd even say urgent, and that is the awakening of arts, culture and heritage to the climate emergency. And so I'm inspired and excited to be able to share today with you. I think we're all aware that the world is far off track to meeting the demands of climate action. We're far off track to meeting the target of the Paris Agreement to hold global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. We have an emissions gap, that is to say a gap in our success at mitigating greenhouse gases and standing behind that emissions gap is an ambitions gap.

So, collectively as a society, we’ve been at this climate action work for many decades now, and yet we still have these gaps. What? What haven't we tried? What else could we bring to the table to try to enhance our response to climate change? Over the past few years, there have increasingly been discussions, a dawning realisation that one thing that might be missing from the climate equation is the cultural dimension. To be very specific, the folks on this call, us, we've been missing from the equation.

Arts, culture and heritage has largely been missing from the climate table. And so, in 2018, a group of folks gathered in San Francisco in the framework of the Global Climate Action Summit to see if we could shift that paradigm. Folks from all over arts, culture and heritage spectrum from libraries, from museums, from music, from heritage, indigenous peoples’ organisations asking ourselves could we knit together those who are already doing work. And could we inspire the balance of our colleagues to join us. And it was in that moment that the idea for a Climate Heritage Network was born, a network of networks that would link together people committed to using arts, culture and heritage to help communities tackle climate change. After San Francisco in 2018, we spent a year designing, preparing the network and in 2019 in October at Edinburgh Castle, we launched the Climate Heritage Network at a fantastic event hosted by Historic Environment Scotland, Historic England and others on this call were founding members. And so that was just under a year ago and in the intervening 11 months we've been busy building out the network and designing its functionality, envisioning what needs to be done to grow the ambition and the capacity of arts, culture and heritage to tackle the climate emergency and taking those actions.

Meanwhile, though of course we've had the COVID-19 pandemic and to be honest, in some ways the Covid19 pandemic has complicated and delayed work on climate change, not just in launching… [inaudible] for many actors and more evidence of that was the necessity of postponing the EU [inaudible], like this until next year. This is the summit that will be held in the UK. The one that Hannah alluded to.

At the same time the COVID-19 pandemic has really underscored so much about what compelled us to create the network in the first place. The need to listen to science, the need to centre the most vulnerable, the need to bring humans relationship with nature into harmony. And also, the idea that transformative change is possible. I mean the very modality of this webinar, the advent of Zoom calls all the adjustments in life that we've made because of the pandemic. You'll see how rapid and far reaching change in the organisation of society is possible when society wills it. And so those lessons and those imperatives underscore the importance of what the network is trying to promote.

And so that brings us to today. Within the membership of the Climate Heritage Network, we were eager to help keep the focus on climate change and to explore what climate change action looks like in the era of Covid; to unite in the Covid era, all those interested in the role of arts, culture and heritage in tackling the climate emergency. And in that spirit, we launched a new global platform that we call Culture by Climate. Culture by Climate is a 45 day period of intensive focus on the role of arts, culture and heritage in climate action. It began just this past Monday and concludes on November 27th. The aims of the Culture by Climate platform or to enhance the capacity of arts, culture and heritage to help build a climate neutral and resilient world in the time of Covid, to promote new partnerships between cultural actors and stakeholders across sectors: energy, agriculture, buildings, land use and to prepare the cultural sector to play its part in driving greater ambition at COP 26 in 2021 and beyond.

You can learn more about the Culture by Climate programme by going to www.culturexclimate.org. It has a number of different series that make up the platform, and one of those series is this Climate Heritage Mobilisation webinar series that we're doing with Historic England as part of their broader Climate Fridays initiative. And so this is our first one, our kick-off one, and I'm so excited this is happening, as Hannah said, we'll use this webinar to give you an overview of the work across the Climate Heritage Network, and then each of the following six webinars we’ll pursue one of the different pathways that network members are pursuing to enhance the capacity and the ambition of culture, heritage, arts to engage in climate action. Going to move to the next slide. Implicit in everything I've said, but perhaps it ought to be made explicit, is that climate change is a core heritage issue. Climate change is not peripheral to the practice of cultural heritage. Climate change is not extrinsic to the mandate to safeguard and conserve cultural heritage. Climate change is core to cultural heritage and heritage needs climate action to succeed, we need the Paris Agreement to succeed in order to do our job. Already we see the impacts of climate change on cultural heritage. Human activities, the burning of fossil fuels, the cutting down of forests are driving unprecedented concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Those concentrations are warming the planet. The warming planet is, in turn, driving increased climate hazards, storminess, desertification, sea level rise and those impacts are threatening cultural heritage. We know from climate science that every degree of warming matters.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has told us that if the planet warms to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, we will see very significant impacts on human and natural systems. And by the way, we've already warmed the planet 1 degree since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, so we're just talking about that Delta between 1 degree and 1.5 degrees. If, however, the planet warms to two degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, the impacts are catastrophic. At 2 degrees of global warming, all of the coral reefs on the planet die. It's a world without coral and analogous impacts to human systems. And so, the safeguarding of cultural heritage depends on climate action. It depends on the Paris Agreement succeeding, which is why climate action is an essential, integral core to the work of cultural heritage safeguarding. So how does the Paris Agreement succeed? How does the planet collectively hold global warming to well below 2 degrees, really to below 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels? The climate scientists tell us that the pathways to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees require rapid and far reaching transitions in basically every facet of life in energy and land, in urban infrastructure and industrial systems, in the way we build buildings, in the way we design cities, in the way we grow food. Rapid and transformative change in all of these sectors.

And so I tell you this, because I want to start to introduce the idea of the remit of culture in these things, Rapid and far reaching change in society. Well, how does one achieve rapid and far reaching change in society without considering the cultural dimensions without considering the values of the people, the acceptability to people of systems change, the disruption, the equity, the injustice of rapid and far reaching change? We really start to see the social and cultural dimensions of climate action and that's why we at the Climate Heritage Network feel strongly that not only do cultural heritage, arts, culture and heritage need climate action to succeed, but that the Paris Agreement needs cultural heritage to succeed. And so we are not extrinsic to climate action, but we are core to it as well, and I want to give the podium back over to Hannah to talk a little bit more about this idea because it's really quite foundational to everything else that's going to come. Hannah?

Hannah: Thanks, Andrew, yes, and I think this is a point that picks up nicely from what we heard Hannah Murrell talked to us about last week, that that interplay between nature and culture that really sits behind our relationship with these environmental changes that we're facing and the real importance of thinking about what cultural heritage and an understanding of cultural heritage can bring to these challenges. And I also wanted to flag another, I mean we're setting a bit of a precedent here, there's another really important paper out today. No pressure, but someone needs to do something similar for our presentation next week. So, Marcy Rockman, who I think is on the call here with Timothy Curler, has put out a paper today, in American Antiquity, that is an IPCC primer for archaeologists. That really sets out very nicely the ways in which archaeologists in particular, but it's applicable to cultural heritage more generally, needs to take into account the challenges of climate change, but also the ways in which we can start to really engage with the climate scientists and with those that are trying to support climate action and what can happen when we start to do that together. So, this network and what we're trying to do is about providing the tools, some practical things that we can start to do as a cultural heritage and the arts sector to really support that climate action that humanity and the planet, quite frankly, really need. We have some questions for you throughout this talk, just to help us understand how other people are approaching or thinking about some of these questions.

So, I think Matt, could we have the first question, please? So we were wanting you to just give us an idea as to, this is a tricky one, because I know that I wouldn't be able to answer it, but which do you think is more important to bring a greater climate change awareness to the heritage sector or to bring a greater cultural heritage awareness to the climate change sector? I think I'd quite like to ask this question of people in the climate change sectors as well. I think I probably know how we might answer.

Matt: I think that could actually generate quite a lively debate, that single question, could it not?

Hannah: Maybe we’ll have a debate one week on a future debate version of the Climate Friday Webinar.

Matt: We should have an open mic session. OK, let's reveal the answers there you go: 65% of you think we should bring greater cultural heritage awareness to the climate change sector. There you go. What say you to that, Hannah?

Hannah: Well, I think that's reassuring for us. But I actually think that's a very important point for me. In my more provocative moments, I think the idea that this conversation around climate change is being dominated by environmental science and presented as an environmental science problem with environmental science solutions has failed, I think as Andrew said at the beginning. And actually that idea of bringing something different and what we can offer into that conversation, I think, cannot be overstated. I think it really is very important and it underpins pretty much everything that the Climate Heritage Network does. So, I'm going to hand back to Andrew, who's going to talk about the overview of how the Madrid to Glasgow Arts, Culture and Heritage Climate Action Plan came about. We should also, while waiting for Andrew to connect his mic, point out that you can spot us in that photo at the bottom there, along with a few other colleagues who you’re going to be hearing from in coming weeks as well. You don't get to see us on video in these webinars.

Matt: Shall I be very naughty and point you out? So this is Hannah. And this is Andrew right there. There you go.

Hannah: Yes, and next to us there's Queen Quet here who we will be hearing from next week as well.

Matt: Absolutely looking forward to that one. OK.

Andrew: That's us at the UK Pavilion. The Green is Great Pavilion at the 2019 UN Climate Summit COP 25 that was in Madrid. And actually the photo is a good segway into this next slide, because what you can see in the photo is that it's a bunch of arts, culture and heritage people at a big climate meeting, and that's relevant because the network really has two ambitions. One ambition is to stimulate a greater discussion of climate change in the cultural heritage world. But the other ambition is to simulate a greater discussion of cultural heritage in the climate world. We don't only want to be talking to ourselves about climate change, we want to share the good news of the positive role cultural heritage can play in transformative climate action with colleagues in climate science, climate policy, climate action. So that necessitates us breaking out of our silos and going to events like the UN COP, and other climate science and climate policy meetings, and taking a seat next to representatives from the transport sector and the energy sector and the building sector and the agriculture sector to tell our story. So, when the Climate Heritage Network was formed, one thing that we were all unified around was the idea that it should be about action, that there were enough forms for talk and that what we needed was a form for concrete and practical action. The network is a network of networks. In other words, it's meant to help create the conditions, the circumstances that will allow a myriad of arts, culture and heritage organisations and networks to themselves increase their ambition to tackle climate change. And so we posed to ourselves the question, what are the barriers to arts, culture and heritage organisations, agencies, unit of governments, NGOs, design firms, indigenous peoples organisations.

What are the barriers to those types of constituencies doing more on climate change? And we spent about a year in a series of meetings, we engaged hundreds and hundreds of colleagues from all different facets of arts, culture and heritage, asking ourselves these questions and trying to refine a list of actions, activities that we could take, that would create the conditions that would improve the ambition and the capacity of our fields to engage in climate action. And what we ended up with is a thing we call the Madrid to Glasgow Arts, Culture and heritage Climate Action Plan. Why Madrid to Glasgow? Well, because the plan was launched in 2019 in December at the UN climate summit that was held in Madrid and it builds towards the next UN climate summit, COP 26, which should be happening right now but has been postponed till November 2021. So, we've given ourselves, it turns out two years to try to significantly increase the condition, improve the conditions that support the climate action of arts culture and heritage organisations. The plan has eight activities representing eight different pathways to achieving those aims. Now, there were hundreds of ideas that we entertained. There are a lot of different dimensions, a lot of different barriers that need to be tackled. We're a brand new network, we had to be practical and so we refined it down to eight activities that we're pursuing. And what we're going to do now is walk you through those eight activities at a high level, giving you a flavour of what they are. And then in the remaining seven webinars in this series, different colleagues from the field, different members of the network who are actually working on taking these activities forward, will talk to you about the concrete steps they're taking. And so I'm just going to launch us right into it. We have prosaically numbered these activities and I'm sorry that's not cleverer but, Hannah could you kick us off by talking about activity one?

Hannah: Yes, and I also realised Andrew that we also haven't even got them in the order of Working Group 1, 2, 3 and 4 in this presentation just to add to the confusion.

Andrew: They are thematically clustered.

Hannah: They are thematically clustered. So, working Group 1 which is led by ICON are looking at the way in which Cultural heritage can support communication to climate action. The sorts of tools that people might need to be able to really mobilise cultural heritage in that role of communication, illustrating the potential for cultural heritage to help address the challenges of climate change, and through providing examples and sharing the tools that others are finding are working in developing new ones to help to realise that. And on that theme, and triggered by that, and also what Andrew was talking about overcoming these barriers, some of these barriers to action we have another question for you. Question 2 please, Matt. So we're interested in, I think again this goes back to that theme of language, which I think is going to be picked up by a few of these, that need to communicate to people who may not share a common understanding of the terminology that we use, and vice versa. And I'm interested in people’s experiences to see whether there are any words or phrases or concepts that we use commonly in the heritage sector that actually, or either could be, or are, or could be seen as a barrier to climate action. And you've got a free text answer there and these are saved so we can come back to them and look at them but, feel free to expand on single word and single word answers. I see people have tradition at heritage up there, but if people have examples then that would also be fantastic.

Matt: There are some good ideas coming in. I'm actually going to reveal the results, because that might actually inspire people to come up with some alternatives. And I can see we're now speaking French in the chat room, so how about that?

Hannah: Brilliant, multilingual. I'm not sure I can dust off my French to be of any use to anyone, that's…

Matt: But what I can say, while people are typing away, for those of you for whom English is not your first language and you're struggling with keeping up with this, I can provide you with a way of getting live captions to view the recording. So in the recording I can show you how to how to get captions or subtitles for the recording, so please contact me afterwards if you need that. OK, we've got some really, really good suggestions in there.

Hannah: Yes, I also see a question from Mariana about explaining the tools. Well, I'm going to leave that to that working group to go into detail on what they've been doing to come up with those toolkits. So yes, sign up for that work. I think that is in two weeks’ time Working Group One, I believe.

Matt: OK, shall we move on?

Hannah: Yes and there are some excellent suggestions in there. Rather worryingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of them are words that we use all the time, such as heritage, historic, tradition, which I think is a, is an interesting observation but one that certainly would echo some of my own experiences, I’ve tried to talk to people about this. So, moving on to our next two working groups, actually, that are very closely related, and I think that picks up quite nicely with some of the words that people were identifying there, or the concepts that are sometimes barriers to engaging with climate change. So Working Group 2 is looking at valuing traditional knowledge, so I think a lot of us are probably aware that a lot of the ways in which people are trying to tackle climate change is very dominated by Western scientific concepts, by the idea that we have a scientific problem in climate change and that we can invent and science our way out of this. And it's a very biased perspective to approaches that are very Eurocentric and concentrating on activities that are probably more familiar to us in the Global North. But not only that, I think there's an awful lot of traditional knowledge both past and extant, and traditional ways of knowing and doing that have just not been part of these conversations, and that we really need to find ways to bring into these conversations and find ways of recognising the value of that knowledge if it isn't being described in scientific journals and papers and publications, which are the backbone of a lot of the reports on this. So, Working Group 2 is looking at how we can capture some of that and the ways in which we can bring that into conversations and start to value that. And it relates very closely to Working Group 7 which is about supporting climate action by local communities and indigenous peoples. And I think it's fair to say that it's very difficult to support climate action by local communities and indigenous peoples if you're not actually finding ways to value what they know. And this is very much about facilitating those processes by which local people and in communities and indigenous peoples can have a voice and bring their knowledge to bear on these challenges that they are facing both locally but also globally and ways in which we can start to share that understanding.

So, it's about how we can support cultural heritage organisations in giving a platform, amplifying the voices of these people who might not always have, traditionally, had a place at the table when we're talking about solutions to climate change. And I think this is also, for me, speaking as someone living in the UK and working in the UK, this is about the ways in which we understand the histories of our places in the ways in which our places have been made. I spend a lot of time talking about our traditional building technologies and designs and what we can learn from that, but also the archaeological evidence of land use and the ways in which those have worked through time. And every group of people in every community around the world will have their own examples of what they know in their local places and, and it's about how we can really provide a better platform and a clearer way of understanding and listening to those people, and then valuing the knowledge that they have about their places. So, that brings us to Working Group 3, which is about this is quite a hot topic at the moment, a lot of the ways in which we view carbon and account for carbon, take account of operational carbon, certainly in the UK at the moment there's a lot of conversation about improving energy efficiency that sometimes misses the point that it is actually possible to improve energy efficiency and increase your carbon footprint. But actually it is also important that we think about the embodied carbon within our existing buildings.

For instance, the materials that they are made from, the transportation, the construction of those, all has a carbon cost. And it's not just about the operational carbon of how much energy you can save by having efficient heating and low carbon electricity, etc. It's actually about how we can avoid carbon through avoiding new construction that is very carbon heavy and reusing our existing building resource. For us in the UK this is really important. We have the oldest building stock in Europe, probably in the world and reusing that and looking after those buildings is a good thing. We apply that approach of repairing and reusing our building, reusing things too, many of the other objects in our lives, but we rarely think about that for building. So, Working Group 3 is really looking at how you can better account for that carbon and providing tools to enable people to make that case to think more holistically about the whole life carbon of our buildings and structures. And I think I'm going to hand back to Andrew for… Oh, lost my slides for Working Group 6.

Andrew: Yes, thanks, Hannah. You may be wondering who are these working groups? The working groups are the main way that the Climate Heritage Network gets things done. The working groups are made up of volunteers from among the membership of the networks. They are intentionally quite diverse, drawing on arts, culture and heritage organisations, units of government, universities, businesses from all around the planet. So, through the work of the working groups, we actually achieve a subsidiary goal of creating new coalitions and new working partnerships across our fields. Each of the working groups has a coordinator or a coordinator, and again, this is simply a member of the network who has volunteered to take the labouring or in helping take the working group forward. Hannah already mentioned that the coordinator of Working Group 1 is from the UK, Icon. Thank you Sarah Cross. Hannah mentioned working groups two and seven and I think I'll just share with you who the coordinators of these working groups are to recognise their efforts, but also because it gives you a flavour of the way the network is organised.

Working Group 2 has co-coordinators. They are the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego in the United States and also the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage in India.

Working Group 7 has co-coordinators as well. One is the part of the city government of Chiang Mai, Thailand, the Chiang Mai City Arts and Culture Centre, and then the other co-coordinator is the Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition and then Working Group 3, the last one Hannah mentioned, has co-coordinators as well. One is another network and I mentioned that the Climate Heritage Network is a network of networks.

The coordinator of Working Group 3 is the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration for existing and historic buildings along with the Office of Historic Preservation for the State of California.

And so, thank you to those network members who have played these leadership roles. And also as I share this just to give you a flavour of how the network works. All of that brings us to working Group 6 and the idea Working Group 6 is coordinating cultural heritage, safeguarding and climate action.

Those of you that tuned into the Historic England webinar last week with Hannah Morell, heard Hannah say that in the climate science literature, one of the leading ways in which culture is treated is as a barrier to climate action. And of course, that plays out in a lot of different ways: the unsustainable consumption and production patterns that gave us climate change in the first place didn't come from nowhere. They are culturally influenced, right? And so, culture has been a part of the problem that has given us climate change and that manifests itself in people's daily lives, but it also manifests itself institutionally, as when we have conflicts over the siting of wind turbines and cultural landscapes, or in interventions to retrofit historic buildings for energy efficiency. So how do we reduce those conflicts? How do we harmonise cultural heritage safeguarding and climate action? The conserving of cultural heritage is a public benefit. It's a good, in the lingo of climate change, it's a co-benefit. And So what we really want to promote are win wins. How do we promote win wins that both advance climate action and safeguarding of cultural heritage, particularly through better urban and territorial planning and deliberative structures that defuse conflicts and find the win wins? And that's the remit of Working Group 6 to promote those kind of strategies. And that brings us, Hannah, to our third and final question. Hannah?

Hannah: Yes. So we wanted to understand more about the barriers to climate action by our sector. So, we were thinking earlier about some of the words and phrases and concepts that we have that might be barriers to others. But what are the barriers in our own sector to us taking greater climate action? And these might be political, they might be structural, they might be financial, they might be to do with understanding, they might be to do with education. So, it would be really interesting to get a feel for what you think are the barriers to that and also help us in the network think about some of the ways in which we might be able to undertake work that can try and address some of these. Matt, are we able to make the answers live again?

Matt: Yes, of course we can. So, what we're looking for here, folks, is a stream of consciousness. We just want you to pour it all out no matter what comes into your head, just stick it in there and let's see what we've got. OK, there you go.

Hannah: There's lots of financial. Like that climate action is beyond our mission. That's a good one. I think we've heard that before, Andrew.

Matt: Perceived lack of relevance, I suppose, segways into that statement as well, doesn't it? Excellent, so good stuff coming in here. This is super bring keep it coming guys keep it coming. OK, still a few more coming in there. OK, I think we've reached a conclusion there, OK? Great, thank you everyone. That's absolutely brilliant.

Andrew: I'm going to move on to the next working group and that working group is looking at using culture to promote climate resilient sustainable development. So that's a mouthful: Climate Resilient, Sustainable Development. What does that mean? It plugs also into this idea of a green recovery that we have in the Covid context, and that is to say that as long as the world is aspiring to rapid and transformative change in every sector in the way we build buildings and live in cities and grow food, we ought to get for that effort improvement in the quality of life of people, we ought to get sustainable development. And so, how do we take forward climate action in a way that also reduces poverty, addresses inequality, improves opportunity? How do we meld the Climate Action agenda and the Sustainable Development agenda? In climate policy, there's a term of art for this phenomenon called Climate Resilient Development Pathways. So, the cultural heritage sector has gotten increasingly better at understanding how cultural heritage can be a driver, an enabler of sustainable development and what we aim to do here is to layer in this idea of climate action. So how do we marry climate mitigation and climate adaptation with sustainable development efforts, specifically looking at the remit of arts, culture and heritage to help advance these objectives? So that's Working Group 5 which is coordinated by our colleagues at United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) culture committee.

Takes us next to working Group 4. And Working Group 4 has to do with climate planning, and you'll notice these activities are building from the individual and local to the more global and international levels. And in Working Group 4 what we're concerned about is the degree to which Arts, culture and heritage gets taken on board in the planning done for climate change by ministries of the environment, by climate agencies and the like. So, for example, how many national climate adaptation frameworks have a sectoral plan for culture and heritage? Surprisingly few. And if you live in and around the UK, you might not know that because there has been good work done in Wales and England, Scotland, also Ireland. The Republic of Ireland has one of the most well developed cultural heritage sectoral plans in their national adaptation framework. But that's not the case around the world and not the case at the city and regional level, local government level, where lots of climate action plans, lots of climate adaptation frameworks, lots of greenhouse gas mitigation plans are completely silent on the cultural dimensions of climate changes. And so what Working Group 4 means to do is address that question, and it happens to be coordinated by my own organisation ICOMOS. And then finally working Group 8. We can't miss the opportunity to address COP 26 given that it is happening in the UK and UK arts, culture and heritage organisations have been instrumental in the launching of the Climate Heritage Network, not the least of which historic England and colleagues at Historic Environment Scotland and elsewhere, National Trust, English Heritage.

So, we want to use the upcoming UN climate summit COP 26, first as an opportunity to amplify the arts, culture and heritage message. So, engage with the COP, engage with its programming, engage with the substantive issues being debated at the COP. Everything from whether or not there will be environmental safeguards in the Article 6 Carbon Trading Framework that hopefully will be hammered out at Glasgow to the issues that just transition, to issues of the reauthorisation of the UN's platform for climate education and capacity building. But then also a broader festival of activities and actions that spotlight the cultural dimensions of climate change. And so, our final working group is devoted to that and that working group is co-chaired by Historic Environment Scotland and the State of California. And so, collectively, these eight working groups reflect the pathways that we picked at the network as our first round of efforts. The first topics that we thought were key to look at in terms of increasing the capacity and the ambition of the arts culture and heritage sector to be a part of the solution to climate change. You'll see here a schedule for the next set of webinars in this series, this Climate Heritage Mobilisation Webinar series is part of Historic England's Climate Fridays and so, there's a webinar for almost all of the different working groups that we've been discussing. And so, in those you'll hear from our colleagues who are doing the work on the ground who are actually taking these activities forward, who are working to realise them and to test them and to scale them up and out. Hannah, can I ask you before we wrap it up and turn it over to Q&A to maybe share some final thoughts about the design of the Madrid to Glasgow Plan and its missions?

Hannah: Yes. Sorry, my sound keeps cutting out so I think I picked that up. And hopefully you can hear me OK. The purpose of this, as we said at the beginning, is about actually taking that step from talking about the relevance of cultural heritage, making that case as to why people need to and should be including us to then turn that into actual practical action with some tangible results. And I think it's fair to say that's pretty daunting and challenging task, trying to do that at a global scale, but I think what's being extraordinary, being part of this journey, means so fortunate to be part of this journey with Andrew and so many others, is seeing how readily so many different colleagues from around the world have come together to look at ways in which we can do that, to share their knowledge and experience, and to learn together about what works and what doesn't and what we might be able to do. And I think, hopefully the flavour of these working groups has given you a taste of the sorts of things that we're trying to do and the ways in which we might be able to start to piece together some actions and demonstrate the results of those and the consequences of engaging and undertaking those actions. And I think there's a kind of line or thread that runs through this, particularly around language. I think we've talked a lot around that, that both language is a barrier, but also when you start to think more carefully about how you're talking about some of these challenges and listen and communicate, but not just shouting loudly about our relevance or your particular perspectives, but encouraging that genuine dialogue that involves listening as well as telling, that we can really start to find some very positive messages about action and activities that can really start to yield results, and that for me is what’s so exciting about the way that we can start to tap some of this previously untapped potential. And also in a very collaborative way in and bring in really a very wide range of parties and people into this, and hopefully you agree, and hopefully, as many of you as possible will join us in this and help with that mission.

Andrew:
Yes, thank you, Hannah, it's a good plug for me to explain that joining the network is free and easy if you go to www.climateheritage.org and click on the Join tab you can do it online without obligation, but hopefully with a lot of opportunity. I think it's interesting also to look at this moment of COP 26 and coming to the COP being in the UK. There are a lot of important issues on the table for COP 26. This year, in fact, in a few weeks it will be the fifth anniversary since the signing of the Paris Agreement and under the Paris Agreement there was a requirement that five years after it was signed, every country would submit a new plan, reflecting enhanced ambition to tackle climate changes. These plans are called NDC's (Nationally Determined Contributions). And as the NDC's are coming in now, what you see is a lack of ambition, that the actions promised in the NDC’s don't get us to a pathway to 1.5 degrees. And so, there is a real need for people invested in climate action to rally, to promote heightened ambition in advance of the COP and to demonstrate pathways to getting to more ambitious climate actions. So that's exactly what we're about in the network and in cultural heritage, just sort of positive message that we bring another set of solutions. We bring another set of tools that haven't been fully leveraged. And so I think it gives us this really great opportunity to tell our story, and it's lucky that we, it's being held in the UK, and I say lucky only because UK cultural heritage institutions have been so engaged in general and in the network that it's very fertile soil for us to operate.

Maybe I'll just make one more observation that is about the culture by climate campaign. I mentioned that at the outset the idea of culture by climate is to refocus us all amidst the Covid pandemic on the climate emergency, and also draw some of these parallels between the pandemic and the climate crisis. Culture by Climate is running until the end of November, but it's anchored by what we're calling Climate Heritage Week 2020. So that's the week of November 16th. It's a special week because it’s when COP 26, would have been if it had not been postponed because of Covid. It also maps to a global initiative of the United Nations called the November Dialogues to build ambition and activity around climate action, and so what we're really trying to do is to be a part of this multi sectoral global campaign by declaring the week of November 16th, Climate Heritage Week 2020. And we're going to have nearly a dozen activities that week, including regional climate heritage forums in five different regions of the world, Africa, South America, Asia Pacific, Europe, as well as a series of dialogues as well as continuing this webinar series. And so please do go to that culturexclimate.org webpage and check out the activities all during Culture by Climate, but especially during Climate Heritage Week 2020.

And we're also inviting all arts, culture and heritage organisations to plan their own climate change related events during the month of November, affiliated events. And if you are able to do that, you can register your affiliated event at that webpage and we'll be happy to promote it through our social media channels. I've been enjoying watching in the chat the people that are… we have quite an illustrious group of participants in the webinar. So, for example, out of the blue when talking about working Group 4, I referenced the great work done in Ireland, which is one of the first countries national governments in the world to have a dedicated built-in Archaeological Heritage Chapter in their national adaptation framework along with agriculture and forestry and whatnot, and I see Jackie Donnelly from the Irish Ministry of Culture, weighing in. Jackie being one of the drivers behind that. So, it's nice to see so many of you joining us today and weighing in. Thank you.

Hannah: I think it's probably time we take some questions.

Matt: Most certainly. So, what we're going to do, I'm going to bring in this panel, over the slides, you will notice that there is a little text box at the bottom there. Any questions you have, please type into that little text box at the bottom of this window we will be able to read your questions. So, we will wait for your questions to come in. We also have… Sorry about the sound effects in the background if you can hear them. We also have some web links as well. So, for the slide, a copy of today's slides please, please feel free to click on the word slides. You'll see the URL appear at the bottom of that window. And for a list of future webinars and indeed recordings for previous webinars, please click on the title webinars. And for all matters relating to climate change on the Historic England website, please click on climate and you'll see the URL appear at the bottom of that window. So, do we have any questions? Not as yet… is the answer, so we're waiting for people to think about some questions, is there anything you would like to say, Hannah?

Hannah: Yes, I'd like to ask Andrew a question, actually. I think it's all really exciting and there's a lot of potential to what we're doing, but I'm interested in, with your overview of all the activities, what do you think are the biggest challenges that we face?

Andrew: Well, it's a big question. I'm going to try to answer the specific piece of the question that has to do with the challenges of the cultural heritage sector to engage in climate action and there's actually been some social science research done on this. One of the leading papers posits that the disconnect between the cultural heritage sector and the climate action sectors is methodological, that cultural heritage is more about qualitative approach, about narrative, whereas climate science is very rigorously rooted in a quantitative approach and that this methodological disconnect creates barriers to interaction. I think at a professional level, a key is to take on board the idea that climate action is a core skill set a core dimension of Cultural heritage work. That, to work in cultural heritage is to be a climate activist, that they go hand in glove that some familiarity with the vocabulary of climate change with the mechanisms of climate change is just a normal part of working in cultural heritage. I think as we grow into that facility, we will do a better job of telling the story of the positive role that arts, culture and heritage can play in climate action, and I think that will resonate in the corridors of climate science and policy and action. They need help. We need to heighten ambition. We need to heighten the action and we're coming with help. Culture can help, and I believe that message will resonate.

Hannah: Yes, actually and that paper, I think I've flagged earlier from Marcy and Timothy Curler on the IPCC primer. I think that actually is exactly the sort of thing that's needed to try and explain some of that, that language for heritage professionals so I think the more we see that's trying to bridge that gap and equip us to have those conversations, the better. We have a question here from Deborah Walton. So, what are some of the common misconceptions and mistakes heritage organisations make when considering their environmental impacts? What should we avoid? So, another pretty broad question. I think my initial answer, Deborah, would be actually the misconceptions offered that they're not relevant, or that the only thing they need to do is to think about reducing their own Carbon footprint. That's the limits of their relevance and I think, actually, the breadth of the activities in the working groups are really bringing home to me how much more we can do. But I don't know whether you got any thoughts on that, Andrew.

Andrew: Yes, I think it's a brilliant question. I think one is the idea that people can't take up climate action unless they are climate scientists, unless they're experts in climate change and don't think that's right at all. In fact, the whole premise of the Paris Agreement is that every sector, every person has to be engaged in transformative climate action, and so there is a role for all of us, and the people like the Climate Heritage Network are trying to make it easier and more accessible. But it's actually a core idea of the Paris Agreement that every single one of us will find a role in climate action. It can't be limited to experts, or it will fail. Another misconception that I try to push against, is this idea that sometimes sets up a conflict between climate action and heritage safeguarding. Well, should we do climate action or should we do heritage safeguarding as if they are opposing ideas? But, as I tried to say at the outset, we need a decarbonised world. We need to hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius to safeguard heritage. So, decarbonisation is heritage safeguarding and so climate action is heritage safeguarding. Now, we can have disagreements about tactics and priorities and we need to look for the win wins but the things that decarbonise the world are making our job of heritage safeguarding easier.

Hannah: Yes, I totally agree. So, Anthony Firth has asked a question about the Ocean Decade Heritage Network. So about how to build an alliance between pressing the case for heritage in the UN Ocean Decade, which is 2021 to 30. Is there an overlap with climate heritage and how can we build that alliance? I think absolutely, there is an overlap with climate heritage. I think, particularly when I was at the last COP in Madrid, there were some really interesting discussions about the ways in which cultural heritage of our oceans is really part of the conversation and the solutions for addressing some of those challenges. How we build an alliance? Andrew, you're the expert in building alliances, I think.

Andrew: I don't know about that, but I…

Hannah: The network of networks.

Andrew: Yes, I agree. Thank you, Anthony, and I agree with what you just said. There has been a growing effort, I think, within heritage to integrate nature and culture, to move to landscape scale approaches that acknowledge the linkages between the natural and cultural values of landscapes and seascapes, and to try to breakdown the silos and administrative silos and legal silos that decouple culture from nature and the twin emergencies of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis have really put a premium on accelerating that work, to look at the role of culture in ecosystem based adaptation, to look at holistic approaches that as I said, integrate the natural and cultural values of landscapes and seascapes in our work and reimagine our work in that context. And so, Anthony, I think your proposal is exactly in line with what needs to happen.

Hannah: Excellent, I think we're out of time now, Matt, so do we hand back to you for…?

Matt: Well, indeed. Thank you. And thank you Hannah and Andrew for a fabulous presentation. Indeed, we have come to the allotted hour and indeed we have run out of questions too. So, let's bring this session to a close. It is for me to thank Hannah and Andrew.