Webinar on Using Culture to Promote Climate Resilient Sustainable Development

Speakers: Hannah, Ege Yildirim, Jordi Pascual, Sofia Fonesca, Stephen Wyber, Ruth Jakobi, Yunus Arikan, Tawanda Gatsi, Albert Stanford.

Hannah: …webinars in this series and this one will be made available, so please do take some time to have a look and also just to say that at Historic England we are going to be continuing our Climate Friday webinar series.

We have a further webinar next week and we will be continuing them in the new year after a short but well-deserved break for Christmas.

We have some of those fixed but some of them we have space for new ideas about things that you would hear, people you’d like to hear from, and topics you’d like discussed, so please do get in touch with us to suggest speakers or offer yourselves as speakers or suggest topics that you’d like to see addressed in these and we will try and fit them into our timetable.

So, I think I said this is a presentation that is looking at how we can use culture to promote climate resilient sustainable development. So, cultural policies do not yet explicitly recognise the connections between culture and environmental sustainability, climate change resilience and the sustainable use of resources but over the next few years, cultural actors, institutions and organisations will have to integrate climate change measures into their strategies, strengthen their resilience and adaptive capacity to those climate-related hazards and natural disasters and improve education, awareness raising and capacity in those fields.

So, this webinar, it represents the work of Working Group 5 of the Climate Heritage Network Madrid-to-Glasgow Action Plan and is going to explore the work that has been going on within that group looking at how we can contribute a climate change dimension to the work of the global campaign of cultural networks on culture and sustainable development.

So, I’m going to introduce our first speaker. Again, apologies if I’m pronouncing your name wrong, please correct me, but Ege Yildirim who is a heritage planner and ICOMOS Focal Point for the sustainable development goals. So, Ege, if you are there, do you want to…

Ege: Yes, I am here. Hello. I am starting now. So, hello everyone. Thank you very much to our colleagues at Historic England and to Andrew Potts and the Climate Heritage Network.

I can see quite a bit of members of the network here, it’s always a pleasure to be together and actually we have many colleagues who are much more knowledgeable than how I feel I am about this subject, but I’m here to contribute from one particular policy angle of the Culture 2030 Goal campaign that we’re doing. I was actually going to leave the general introduction of the campaign to Jordi, but since he hasn’t been speaking before me, I should probably say a couple of words on the campaign itself.

So, also to introduce myself and my pronunciation, my name is Ege Yildirim from Turkey. I’m an urban planner.

I’ve been the ICOMOS Focal Point for the sustainable development goals for the past four years and also very heavily involved in the ICOMOS representation in the Culture 2030 Goal campaign which is actually a network of international, regional, cultural networks. We have about eight or nine, depending on the time and very well represented of the cultural actors around the world, you know, NGOs especially. And this advocacy has been continuing since before the adoption of the SDGs in 2015 and after the adoption it has been revamped and we are here to follow and lobby and strengthen the presence of culture in the SDGs in the 2030 agenda.

We have been producing some documents and reports to that effect and have been having very interesting successes, let’s say milestones in the past months thankfully which I’m sure we’ll touch on with our other speakers. So, next slide please.

[they discuss the visibility of the presentation]

 Ege: So, looking at the concept note of our event today just very briefly, it’s been mentioned that cultural policies need to recognise the culture/climate connection, also actors need to act more strongly on this connection and the Working Group 5 which I’m a part of and we’ve been communicating sometimes this year, we are geared towards contributing to the climate change dimension of this campaign that I mentioned.

So, I’m framing this presentation around this policy practice action framework.

On one side, we are working at a very high level policy platform, but on the other hand, these policies are only meaningful to extent that we see real action and change on the ground which is related to the localising of these policies and implementation and also their embracing by very different kinds of stakeholders on the ground, you know, people who do the work. So, with that caveat, whenever I talk about these policy advocacy works that we’ve been doing, it is always with that ultimate aim in mind that we work I should say. So, bringing together these different kinds of policy agendas, you can see with these icons, some of the major headings we have going from the more specific “Ecommerce is working with cultural heritage” but we’re part of the larger culture-sphere of course, and how we’re relating with the climate agenda and the sustainability agenda. And these are all interlinked because the crises that we are facing on Earth today are interlinked, you know, human crises and planetary crises. And the SDGs are very holistic and they are actually a key to address climate action in a way that strengthens it, that makes it socially viable, you know, using socioeconomic dimensions of society to actually accelerate climate action so they are working in tandem with each other. And the same integration is valid with culture on one side and the larger agendas of climate and sustainability on the other side. We are looking at ourselves and being self-critical, trying to improve our own practices and our policies but also trying to get the message across to non-heritage, non-cultural actors who we need to get onboard to actually discover the culture agenda and hop onboard with us in terms of championing that, so I think that this kind of interplay is important to emphasise. Next slide, please.

Are we at the slide with the draft resolution? Yes, I think so. So, in terms of this policy call to all kinds of actors to transform their policies and practices, this little example is from the latest ICOMOS activity and I think it’s a very nice example, very promising in terms of how we’re using our next milestone of a general assembly with a resolution that clearly states for our huge network of 10,000 ICOMOS members to see clearly the relationships, these connections we’re talking about: How people are connected to heritage and places. It’s all about intercultural, inter-people dialogue and how this will better realise the full potential of heritage to deliver climate resilient pathways and strengthen sustainable development at the same time and here the just transition, the equity, the social justice issue of climate action is also emphasised. 

Now, going on to the broader Culture 2030 Goal platform again and this presentation now will focus on the 2019 report that I was the main writer of together with a lot of excellent colleagues, distinguished colleagues who provided wonderful contributions to this report. This was really an attempt to gather some pertinent data on the state of how culture is being addressed after the SDGs have been adopted. So, after 2015, every year at the UN HLPF, various states, parties, national governments, plus other stakeholders have been submitting progress reports and we analyse these reports and input to see how this topic was addressed. And here, also looking at the local government dimension through the VLRs I should also emphasise. And then we came up with some recommendations for the way forward and to improve the state we’re in in. 

So, here are some highlights from the content of the report which is downloadable. You can find it easily on the culture2030goal.net website online. So, the climate change references in the report have been actually quite strong when we think about it and one confession is, at the time we were writing this report, I don’t think we had the climate mindedness that we have today. I think it’s evolving within ourselves as well. It is definitely covered. There are important references by our UN Special Rapporteur on culture rights, Karima Bennoune and the UN Secretary General himself, talking about how culture is a powerful resource and specifically cultural heritage being addressed here and how we need to include these in our discussions now. So, these are there. And we also mentioned SDG, 13 of course, that’s how climate is addressed within the SDGs and how in this respect, cultural knowledge and resources are enablers of sustainable development.

Then moving into the bulk of the content, the crux of the matter, here are some highlights of how the VNRs turned out to represent culture. And actually, we’ve had some really interesting and exciting, let’s say, discoveries of some national reports, really putting culture at the heart of their sustainable development strategies and policies.

The most visually exciting one, let’s say, was the small island, developing state of Vanuatu. They have actually created their own kind of sustainable development goals matrix, putting cultural identity as number one. Very interesting. The report also talked about the spirit of the Ni-Vanuatu people and how this guided the whole process.

Other countries like Montenegro stress their culture connection to quality of life. The Greek report talked about the direct and indirect contributions of culture to sustainable development and Latvia talked about how creativity, which is very much related to culture of course, actually helps foster abstract thinking which supports excellence in science, technology, engineering and maths.

So, some very innovative connections were made here. And you can see some other visual examples here. Many, many reports used graphics. The unspoken word, let’s say, the pictures that tell 1000 words, so somehow unconsciously or implicitly, culture was featuring there through how the cases were driven home, how points were made using snapshots of the countries’ daily realities and one way of localising really our actions.

Apart from the, let’s say, more qualitative analysis of the VNR reports in the SDGs, we also did some basic statistical keyword analysis which also yielded some really interesting results about culture.

Now, everybody must have heard about how culture as a fourth pillar of sustainable development is something explicitly mentioned in many UN policy documents. A lot of our advocacy is based on this. The word “pillar”, let’s not get stuck on that, there are many debates on whether or not it should be a pillar but culture as a concept, let’s say, as a connector and enabler should feature just as much as the social, economic, environmental dimensions of the SDGs.

And the pie chart you can see gives us kind of a different reality. When the numbers speak, you see 5% within the whole occurrence, let’s say, set of these words in the reports. You see that 39% of them are taken up by the social dimension, 25% is taken up by environmental, 31% by economic and only 5% by culture, so this is an area where we could actually keep following and lobbying for inclusion of more cultural references. We also did a country by country analysis and the top score as you can see, 10 countries, and this is an interesting entry point into policy where you can actually reach out to these exemplary countries and perhaps partner up with them. Actually, with Italy we have already partnered up in the 2020 HLPF. We had a virtual side event with Italy and they’re a good champion of this cause.

Also, we looked at the context of use, how related words are used and see here actually, climate change is kind of absent from the slide. So that’s one thing I noticed when I was preparing this presentation and maybe it’s worthwhile going back to our analysis and adding some more components specifically looking at climate. But I think the climate/culture connection seems even behind other connections that people make to culture. You can see that the references in the SDGs text… The limited number of cultural references in the actual SDGs text does not feature closely together with the climate goal either. So, unfortunately, these are places where we see where work needs to be done. Next slide, please.

So, despite some of these challenging findings, we also have things to look forward to, some promising evidence of how countries are using culture in diverse ways, entry points into their strategies, presentation and progress reporting, but the amount in general is limited of course.

As we mentioned, the cultural dimension lags behind. But there is a large potential that is untapped so that’s where we can keep working. And the VLR movement, the local reviews are growing and cities, local governments are an important player in this case we have. And here, looking at quickly the icons, you see different sizes of icons and this represents the kind of hierarchy of which goals have been most closely linked in these policymakers’ minds with the culture. You see that’s 11, obviously, the city is a bigger one, and climate unfortunately does not figure again in these top six or seven, so it’s in the bottom half of making that connection. Again, similar finding. And in terms of the avenues of action for all kinds of stakeholders, we were emphasising the importance of considering culture actively, transversely in different kinds of policy areas from the outset of planning processes and project and budget decisions etc, building a coherent community around this, gathering in important meetings. The data aspect, better collection and dissemination of data and here UNESCO’s work can be an inspiration. There is the climate adaption involved in there as well. Again, the local dimension and how the cultural sector has to strengthen its own efforts. So, this is the content that I wanted to present today and again, all of these will be meaningful when we put it into context with all the examples that are out there, so I’m looking forward to listening to our other speakers today and listening to different aspects so we complete the puzzle together. Thank you very much for your time. Here are my contact details and wishing you a successful rest of the day. Thank you.

Hannah: OK. Thank you so much. That was fantastic. I think we have Jordi back in the room and may be able to talk to you so I’m going to hand over to Jordi, are you there?

[They discuss a technical aspect of the presentation].

Jordi: Thank you very much Hannah. I assume that probably at this stage the webinar has been introduced duly by colleagues in Historic England. Just a reminder that this webinar is a production of the Working Group 5 of the Climate Heritage Network and that this Working Group 5 tries to contribute to the climate change dimension of the global campaign of cultural networks that Ege mentioned and that I will very briefly explain and compliment what already very well Ege presented.

The campaign was born in 2013 when a number of global cultural networks tried to have a standalone goal on culture and struggled to have when this reality… We discovered it was not politically possible to have as many mentions as possible on culture in the SDGs. We produced four documents. At that the time that campaign was #culture2015goal and importantly enough, the final document that we published the same day when the SDGs were approved, we accepted, we recognised the progress but the report mentions there are still many, many challenges remain ahead of us. And most of these challenges still remain and if you have listened to Ege when she analysed the submissions of nations to the High-Level Political Forum in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, we can notice still there is progress but it is not enough.

The campaign, you saw the wonderful report written by Ege, we are committed to produce another report analysing the High-Level Political Forum submissions as soon as possible. And this year in 2020, because of the COVID pandemic, of course, we published a statement and we organised several events. And probably the most important output of this 2020 is the fact that we are committed to formalise more the campaign, to be more active, to of course struggle for the achievement of the 17 goals but also to provide a critical view of what the SDGs do not say.

We are committed to make culture a dimension, an explicit and operational dimension of development because we are convince that unless this dimension is explicit and operational, development cannot happen. And cultural actors, we have strong responsibility in this fight, achieving the SDGs, yes of course, but also defending the intrinsic values that we bring to society with our policies, our programmes, our projects and this webinar is a wonderful example, the Climate Heritage Network is a wonder incarnation of these objectives. I think that’s all. I hope that the system works well and I will be able to follow the next presentations. Dear friends, I am sorry. Thank you very much.

Hannah: Thank you, Jordi. It was lovely to hear from you eventually. So sorry about that delay. [AUDIO CUTS OUT] …and Chief Executive Officer of TEIDUMA, Consultancy on Heritage and Culture, a member of the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Community, and a member of Stop Food Waste Island. So, Sofia, do you want to pick up and present your presentation for us?

[They discuss the sound quality]

Sofia: OK. First of all it’s a pleasure and an honour to be here today with all of you. As you were saying, I am an archaeologist, a member of ISOMOS and I’m a master composter with Stop Food Waste Ireland and that means I’m a volunteer in helping, to bring awareness of food waste to individuals and their households, their neighbourhoods and their communities. So, empowering people that household at a time we can together tackle this huge problem that is food waste, so direct climate action through food waste.

And why food waste? As you can see in the slide, the numbers are huge, are scary and it’s almost outrageous that one third of the food produced in our world goes to waste. That’s the equivalent to one billion tonnes worth, around one trillion US dollars and it’s also the third cause and also solution for tackling climate change as concluded by the project [INAUDIBLE].

So, you can have a visual on the huge amount of food that is lost in our world. If food waste was a country it would be the third greenhouse gas emitter after China and the United States so you can have an idea of the dimension. But there is more to food waste than wasted food. There is also ethical and social significance of the food we produce because we are destroying our environment, digging out water and the biodiversity to produce food that afterwards nobody is using and there’s almost 690 million people going hungry in our world. And as we saw just before, it’s also a significant contributor to global warming. So, it’s really one of the big issues on climate change.

But the good news is that in opposition to other situations that are causing our climate change like energy, the fuels, the transport globally, we stop food waste, we can empower ourselves and we can really be part of the solution. So, the programme that Stop Food Waste Ireland implements is five steps that we can all be part of and integrate it in our households like be aware of what foods we waste and why, preparing meal lists when we go shopping, new ways and better ways of storage so the food lasts longer, cooking, serving and reusing the food, leftovers and finally, do home composting in our houses in a way that we can even afterwards use in a small vegetable garden or even with our aromatic herbs. And as the file says, and it’s very important to be aware of: “Consumers must be encouraged to shift to nutritious and safe diets with a lower environmental footprint”.

And so, how can culture…? How can we help in supporting this mentality shift for the consumers? I do believe that with traditional knowledge and cultural knowledge, just like Ege was saying before, we can really help out.

And I bring here the example of the Mediterranean Diet. “Diet” comes from the Greek “diaita” and means “way of life”. The Mediterranean way of life, the Mediterranean diet was inscribed in 2013 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and includes countries like Cyprus, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Italy, Morocco and Portugal. And it’s a way of living that really integrates all the Mediterranean region.

And what are the principle values and base lines of this Mediterranean way of life? So, one of the most important things is the conviviality, eating together. A huge table with different generations together, improving their social relationships. The hospitality, intercultural dialogue, creativity, the diversity Also, the respect for the natural cycles. The seasonality of the local products, the importance of the traditional markets, a place of gathering, of interconnection and where you realise which products are really in season also. The craftsmanship, the use of traditional objects like baskets, pottery and glass to cook and to preserve foods and also the importance of women in these communities. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts they are the ones that transmit the traditions, the knowledge and skills related to this way of life.

Regarding foods, which aspects are so important in the Mediterranean diet? Well, bread fruit, nuts, grains and the wonderful olive oil, a moderate consumption of dairy products, of meat and wine. Seasoning more with herbs and less salt. The consume of fish and seafood. Water as the main drink throughout the day. The frugality, the simplicity, the reuse of the leftovers. And again, the seasonality and high consumption of fresh vegetables produced locally. The Mediterranean diet is almost one of the healthier ones in the entire world, so bring this kind of perspective and these principles to our livelihoods, to our tables, can really, in my point of view, bring awareness to the richness and diversity of our common heritage while in the meanwhile we are tackling climate change by avoiding food waste. Thank you so much.

Hannah: Thank you ever so much, Sofia. That was fantastic. I think I’m going to break with the order as originally planned because unfortunately one of our speakers has to leave us and I think it’s pretty clear that we’re going to overrun. So, I wanted to hand over to Stephen next so that we have the opportunity to hear from him. Stephen Wyber is manager of policy and advocacy at the International Federation of the Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), so, over to you, Stephen.

Stephen: Thank you very much, I hope you can hear me.

Hannah: Yes we can. That’s great.

Stephen: Great. OK perfect. First of all, thank so much to Historic England and of course to Andrew and the entire Climate Heritage Network for setting up this event and for the invitation to talk.

I, as mentioned, come from the International Federation of the Library Associations and Institutions and we are the global organisation for libraries in much the same way as ICOMOS is for monuments and sites. We’ve heard lots of reasons already why this is such an important issue and I wanted to come at this from the library side. Now, there are different ways in which we can come at this. Of course, one is looking at the collections and there’s clearly an important role for the sorts of data, the sorts of materials that are held in libraries.

So, for example, much of the time, the sorts of historic data that we can use in order to show that climate change is happening, its impact, how it’s changing our landscape, how it’s changing our habits, this is information data that is held within libraries. Similarly, it’s not just data, there’s a lot of narrative, quantitative sources out there that help us understand. Travel guides, old photos, old images, ship logs can give a fantastic idea of the prevalence of extreme weather, of different phenomena, of different characteristics that we can see that give an idea of what is happening and how it’s actually affecting the world around us.

Clearly also, libraries and other documentary heritage institutions can have really important role in safeguarding traditional ideas, traditional knowledge. Of course, this also helps us understand what’s going on, the changes around us. It can also, just as we’ve heard from Sofia, help us bring back, help us rediscover and hopefully readopt these more traditional ways of doing things that are more sustainable. And of course, they can play a crucial role in helping reduce the damage that climate change can cause to different communities.

However, what I wanted to do was focus not so much just on collections but rather the power of the spaces that cultural institutions can offer and in this regard actually give concrete examples from here. Why these spaces matter? Cultural institution spaces matter because they are in general non-commercial. They’re focused on the community and its heritage. They’re places which encourage you, which really urge you to take a longer term view, to think about yourself in context away from all the pressures of home, away from all the pressures of work. In the case of libraries of course, they are generally free and as long as the institutions themselves put a bit of thought into it, they can be welcoming, really accessible places. And we can see clearly right now the ability to congregate together in a physical space is limited, but we’re already seeing some examples of how it’s possible to recreate this experience in the virtual world.

So, as I said, these cultural spaces, the spaces that are run by our institutions, by our members can have this really powerful ability to make us think, to make us reflect. They can be a great way of exposing people to new ideas and realities in a way that they may not necessarily accept if they’re dictated by government or if they’re dictated by scientists or whatever else. It’s a more human/humane way of doing things. As such, they can prove to be much more effective in terms of making behaviour change happen, of actually really helping people to own and to integrate. And I would argue, coming back to this theme of resilience, that this is a really crucial factor because how we are resilient is when we are able, when individuals themselves are actually engaged, when they have the information and the motivation to act themselves. Because we know that especially faced with climate change, command and control is limited, especially in the face of uncertainty and change. Just as in the same way we focus on the need for governments to take cultural factors into account when planning policy in order to ensure that people actually accept it, that they engage with it, that they own it. We can do the same through cultural spaces.

Now, the previous photo –I’m explaining slightly later of course- is from a space known as the Treehouse which is in the National Library of Singapore and this is a space that’s deliberately being created already for almost 10 years for children as a space that hosts materials, events and activities, helping children understand climate change, environmental protection and how to respond. The idea is to create a new generation of people who are engaged, who are thinking about this, who are ready to act and feel confident to do so.

Another example comes from here, and this is a map from the Russian Library for Young Adults for their Environment Information Day. And so, once a year, they hold a whole series of events across the entire country, all focused on this question of how can we get young people engaging in the environment. How can we get them understanding what’s going on, understanding what they can do. And this compliments the formal education system but in a sort of informal way that again allows children, allows young people to investigate, to own, to understand what’s going on and actually take ownership of it which of course is once again key for resilience.

So, in summary, because I have to go fairly quickly to make sure everyone else has time, I think there’s important potential in the libraries for other cultural heritage institutions to see their potential as spaces, as spaces where people can develop the awareness, the motivation to act on climate change, the ability to respond to deal with the consequences which of course is utterly fundamental for resilience.

It’s also important to underline that, as spaces, this is a way in which our institutions can contribute, that crucially, they don’t need to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. They can work with others. It’s a unique contribution that cultural institutions can make in partnership with others and so, hopefully as we move forwards, we can see this effort to integrate efforts that in cultural policies, we bridge, we reach out to other sectors but also that other sectors can reach out to us, to our institutions, to make things work. Thank you.

Hannah: Thank you, Stephen. That was wonderful and definitely, lots of comments there about the importance of libraries and how beautiful some of those spaces are. Definitely makes me yearn for a time when we can actually go and visit them and be together with people… [AUDIO CUTS OUT].

Yes, we can hear you loud and clear Ruth. Thank you. Over to you.

Ruth: I’m so sorry for the other speakers and I’ve really been thrilled to hear the presentations from all over the world. It’s really exciting, so let me start with thanking you for this really kind invitation. I’m really excited about being amongst so many distinguished speakers. It’s really a pleasure to be with you here. And I also would like to thank the International Music Council who actually is a member of the Culture 2030 Network and my colleague Silja Fischer from the International Music Council actually has asked me to present a little bit what the music sector is doing in the field of climate action and environmental sustainability as one example from Europe to talk to you about what it’s done in the network of International Music Council. So, that’s us, the European branch of the International Music Council. We base all of our work on the 5 Music Rights. I let you discover here and I don’t want to use too much time to talk about ourselves so you can all get them on the web links that I will share in a second.

So, what we do in the field of climate action. We have been part of the Pastoral Project in Bonn, in our home and host city in 2020. We should have held our European Forum on Music in June 2020 in Bonn as part of the Beethoven celebrations. You might know or not know that this year is Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. For obvious reasons, this activity had to be turned into a series of online events, but nevertheless we did what we could do and we put our high-level panel of [INAUDIBLE] on climate action, “Music as a Driver for Change”, online already in June.

As you can see from the photos, we had high-level speakers from the European Commission. We had Commissioner Gabriel with us, we had the head of the [INAUDIBLE] committee, Sabine Verheyen from the European Parliament and we also had ex-MEP Helga Trüpel as a moderator and then you can also see two distinguished artists who actually use their art to raise awareness about climate issues. And you can also see my joint secretary general, Simone Dudt because actually, at the European Music Council, we have a dual-leadership model.

But this is not the only part of the online series. As I said, it was a series of events, so we also had a very hands-on workshop where we had many participants and tried to tackle issues on how can I have my music festival greener and how can I have my conference greener.

What can we in the office of our networks do? And also of course, on which level do we have what should be raised this issue to a political level so there I join speakers that have been talking before me. And the issues that we tackled really went from very, very down-to-earth things like switching off your electricity bar when you leave the office or not letting everything on standby but really the turning the power off your equipment through to touring artists or not anymore touring artists and obviously also touring audiences which very often when we come to huge music festivals are much bigger an issue than three or four artists on stage, are the thousands of people that come to attend the event. And they might leave for example, their low-level, low budget tents which consist only of plastic on the side of the festival. We tried to look at it of course. We didn’t find solutions for everything but we started a discussion and we’re tackling these issues from a very technical and practical side and we collaborated on this with the Green Music Initiative and the Go Group.

We also produced a reader with some more in-depth articles and background articles. You can find all the recordings and the documentation on our website and I see that Hannah is already kind enough to post all the links in the chat. Thank you very much. So there we collected a few more background articles for our conference participants and of course for the wider public to see where you can find further reading and we also collected lots of links for further information. And that’s something that we always tried to do in our European Forum on Music which is our big members conference. We collected project that our members have been doing in the field of climate action and we presented them on an online web space which we can also find on the web space in the links in the chat.

So, all this was in the frame of the Pastoral Project of the Beethoven celebrations and in the frame of our European Forum on Music online series but this is not the only way and the only area where we tried to tackle issues of environmental sustainability. We also joined together with other networks, casual networks outside the music sector to tackle actually some of the SDGs. We have heard a lot about the SDGs already and one of those that we choose is also climate action, so we look into possibilities, how we can provide capacity building, how we can improve the situation for our staff and offer training etc and this is also where we stand right now.

So, for us, the next steps are two-fold so to say. We really want to set a policy, a strategy for our own more environmental behaviour in the office, in the membership organisation, in the board and for our events. In particular, in the frame of this Shift Project we would like… which tackles other SDGs, we would like to look at what is actually hindering our change. Where do we see? Where do we have resistance to change? Because I think we all agree that we need to change in times of environmental sustainability but we very often don’t really do it and we try more in a psychological way maybe to find out why this is so and what we can do about this.

And now I’m really ready for the last slide. So, thank you very much.

Hannah: Thank you ever so much, Ruth. That was really fascinating. I am going to try one last time to connect with our lost speaker. So, Yunus, I can see now that you are in the presenter box with a microphone that looks like it might work. Can I hand over to you and fingers crossed that we can hear from you.

[They discuss the sound for the presentation].

Yunus: So, this is Yunus Arikan from ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability. I didn’t prepare too many slides. Maybe this time it helps so that we will not have to go through all of them. Just a quick question, sorry not a question, a first introduction. This is a great pleasure. This is the last event of two months of mobilisation as part of the Climate Heritage Network and I have always enjoyed in this community. I’m not an urbanist, I’m not a culture expert, I’m a pure environmental engineer and engineers do look at the world in a different context and whenever I’ve got connected to the culture community, I’ve enjoyed and I’ve been inspired and I’ve been positive thinking so it’s a real pleasure for me to be joining you. I want to start with ICLEI because there is a connection in those discussions before. Also, I’d like to honour my colleague Jordi from UCLG, you have been really championing for years the culture in the cities space and the climate space as well and the sustainable space of course, Andrew. And I’m very happy to hear my colleague/friend Ege at the beginning and of course, I would like to recommend Sofia to include Turkey cuisine also as part of the Mediterranean because there’s definitely a lot of things we can share in the Mediterranean cuisine and diet.

Anyway, ICLEI has been in this process of sustainability. Since 1990, we have been one of the largest networks and over these years, as Ege was mentioning, there is interpretations of sustainability, we have evolved our understanding, we are now defining our pathways towards sustainability through low emissions, resilient nature-based circular and equitable and people-centred development. So, there’s a relevance to that because over these 25 years since 1992, we have been relatively alone as the local government networks were championing sustainability because nations and the United Nations didn’t take us seriously.

We were very happy on the way to 2015 to have this embracement of sustainability issues beyond 'environment hippies', or environment, let’s say, 'freaks' like us and that is what makes a difference because now it’s expanded to all the levels of government and all actors of society.

In that sense, I think… The title of my presentation you may notice is “Preserving the Sustainability of Culture” which is our past but it is the positive part of our culture because our culture is also not always perfect, especially nowadays when we are talking about the divestment, our dependency to get rid of fossil fuels. This was a culture, and there are efforts from many spaces in the world that they want to leave this culture past. And in that sense, it is not that much surprising because the sustainability community has managed to make this case now in everybody’s agenda and it’s not anymore we are rejecting to something else.

We are not always rejecting to nuclear energy or rejecting to cars but in fact, we are building a new civilisation collectively. We are building a new culture of sustainability that is made [INAUDIBLE] enough to transform our societies. And that is where the cultural heritage community comes because building a culture cannot be done by just money, it cannot be done just by technology, it needs human commitment, it needs human power. At the time when in 2015 when we have culture and the SDG 11 which is why cities are so much embracing the cultural agenda, at the time, the same year, we made this Paris Agreement of the 1.5 degree goals, obviously this transformation is only through the social understanding and collective thinking.

And in that sense, maybe this year is also another opportunity because we have felt over these dark moments in 2020, people were just connecting to each other through music, I mean, through their social bonding and then they understood the more together they can unite themselves, they can change, they can face the challenges. And now there is the spirit that if we can handle the COVID pandemic, we know that we’re in the second phase or third phase for somewhere, but we know we will be getting over it. But the collective power will also help us to adverse by diversity and climate change.

So, these three slides I’d like to share our contribution from ICLEI. When the Climate Heritage Network was created in 2018, I was part of that first session in San Francisco, that was also the moment where we bringing the culture community to the UNFCCC process. We had been advocating for this ambitious agenda and we are very happy now on the way to COP26 we have an agenda called Multilevel Action COP to be held in Glasgow.

And one element…We have six pillars- one of them is expanding the climate agenda. In the climate space we as the champions of this space have always been facing the hard-core government, which are transport, energy, finance which are always resisting climate action but we are trying to expand this. We want to bring culture ministers, we want to bring urbanisation ministers, we want to bring education, we want to bring youth, family ministers and in that sense, Climate Heritage Network [INAUDIBLE] is fantastic and we’re very happy to be together in that sense. And [INAUDIBLE] in Pastoral, my colleague Ruth advertised this, it was also the moment where we could bring the music and also the connection to nature as the element of a new way of dealing with climate change. Because the new climate space is not anymore mitigation, it is much more embedded to nature and with this Pastoral Project, I think we’ve demonstrated the need and the potential synergies and in that sense, I’m very happy many culture community leaders have signed up to the Beethoven artist [INAUDIBLE] and this was for us a legacy that we’d like to build going forward.

And lastly, the Daring Cities, and that again connects to our work. We have been having these discussions in October and we had two events from the Climate Heritage Network and that was one of those culture and climate two month marathon. It also proved once again that yes, we are going through dark times, but on the recovery and in the rebuilding, people [INAUDIBLE] this philosophy of their new ways of living connected much better to humans, human wellbeing and human sensitivities.

In that sense, I think there is a huge potential. Therefore, I’d like to conclude in my remarks in the sense that Climate Heritage Network and this community, connecting culture to climate is perfect and timely and we have made a fantastic achievement over these couple of months. And on the way to Glasgow, I’m confident that, especially in Italy, in the COP26, we should be creating even more impact and we could bring the results so that building a new culture of sustainability goes through cultural awareness and heritage assets and building new ones, more environmentally friendly, more inclusive, more sharing and much more renewable and climate friendly of course.

With that I’d like to conclude my input to the session and thank you very much. It’s nice to really join this, let’s say, interesting experience of connecting but not seeing anyone but to feel that we are one big family.

Hannah: Yunus, thank you so much. Yes, and I think that the experience of connecting but not seeing anyone is one that will be the takeaway from today, possibly slightly symptomatic of these strange times we live in. But thank you, that was fantastic. Tawanda, I think you are back online with a microphone.

[they discuss sound quality for the next speaker]

Tawanda: So, my name is Tawanda. I’m here today together with my colleague, Albert Stanford. I’m the community development coordinator for the Heritage Innovation Trust, a non-governmental organisation in Zimbabwe. So, today we will be presenting a joint presentation together with my colleague, Albert Stanford who is the project coordinator. So, firstly let me leave Mr Albert to do the first part of the presentation then I will take it from there. Is that OK?

Hannah: That’s perfect.

Albert: OK. Thank you so much. My name is Albert Stanford and I’m the project director here at Heritage Innovation Trust. We aim to be part and parcel of this big organisation or big movement, so to speak, that is actually taking a closer look into the culture and heritage, the impact of climate change to culture and heritage.

We thank you so much for coming up with such kind of an event. We were hoping but… It must go on and on because we have discovered that culture when it’s on has come under threat from climate change but it’s not that easy to talk about. From our perspective, I think 2019, as the Heritage Innovation Trust, we headed towards an event, an event that is the title of “Innovative response to the impact of climate change to culture and heritage”. However we think each year… We thank you all for coming up with such kind of event again and when the world is [INAUDIBLE] with such a pandemic is COVID-19. But usually, when we get some kind of things usually, I’d like to get back to the sources.

That is what I’m going to do I think in a minute or two. Probably we do not assume that we are on the same footing in terms of climate, we are on the same footing in terms of climate change. I want to explain more in terms of climate, the way we understand it and the way probably -maybe somebody understands climate in another way- because what I strongly believe is that climate from my own perspective, it is average weather conditions of a meteorological element within an area of a period of time, [INAUDIBLE] atmospheric pressure, wind, rainfall and humidity.

But then, we move on to the current topic of climate change. What is climate change actually? That topic actually I’ve been talking and discussing with my colleague here but if we say “climate change” as a phrase, we are actually exonerating both climate and change on its own but the actually the elements within the climate actually change due to activates that are caused by people. That’s why you see the next slide which includes global warming, that is from fossil fuels and ecosystem, human activities and culture.

So, we want to look at climate change. Is the climate changing on its own? Or it is human activities? And those human activities, I believe we all agree that we have gases from the fossil fuel world, we have gases from the binning of lots of things, the carbon emissions which is actually contributing to the global warming… of which global warming we know that some may say that they’ve… got an advantage in terms of global warming, but 90-95% of the research we all agree from archaeologists, scientists, even anyone else, we can all agree that climate change on its own, 95% has got a negative impact. Actually, we have got negative impact from the humankind. However the humankind is the one which we need to protect here but for the humankind to be protected, we need to deal so much with the activities of each and every human people to see how much we are contributing to global warming. I want you and me to believe that it is not the plants or the animals such as [INAUDIBLE] or elephants that are contributing that, but it is the activities of the humans that is actually causing such kind of thing.

So, since I highlighted and indicated that climate is an average weather condition of meteorological elements within an area of a period of time, we have come to a time where high levels of sea is happening, we have come to a time when we have tornados, we have come to a time when [INAUDIBLE] like in Zimbabwe. I think last year we explained the [INAUDIBLE] died and the situation was so dire.

So, we went there and we observed that culture has been actually eroded. So, the ecosystem on its own meanwhile was also under threat so it was within that ecosystem… We all know that an ecosystem is a [INAUDIBLE] plants and animals within a community. So, it is within that same context that people, human beings are actually contributing negatively into that ecosystem, so thereby destroying themselves. [INAUDIBLE] So, we have got to put a foot down in terms of restoring the ecosystem, in terms of stopping global warming or to try and mitigate our culture… can go on and on in trying to stop this global warming or the climate. I can hand over to my colleague here.

Tawanda: OK, taking over from Mr Albert. The Zimbabwean context. Let me take you through firstly, culture in the Zimbabwe context, equally as in any location within the African context is premised in a complex manner whereby it tends to include the metaphysical aspects which include the trees and the rivers, therefore culture can play a significant role towards mitigating the impact of climate as well as mitigating those aspects which in turn would mean that climate change will not have a significant effect within communities. Just quickly, I’d like to draw a case from Zimbabwe. Let me take you through a mountain which is called Guruguru as well as the Guruguru community. The name simply means “liar” in translation English. At the epicentre of the Zimbabwean culture are the traditional leaders, chiefs in particular, who are prescribed by the Zimbabwean constitution as the soul custodians of culture and the heritage. We see that due to climate change as well as to the global warming effect, which is occurring, the place, or rather the community, is managed within a very much significant manner, whereby we draw lessons from culture.

Let me highlight these aspects. Basically, within the Guruguru community, there are intangible cultural heritage aspects which guide the way people tend to interact with their environment as well as with the nature.

Firstly, let me take you through taboo. The cutting down of trees within the community as well as the mountain itself is considered a taboo and anyone who practices or who does this is considered to draw bad luck to himself as well as to trigger sporadic droughts within the area. This therefore would mitigate the impact or rather the human actions of cutting down trees as well as maintain the nature as well as the natural inhabitants of the mountain itself.

Secondly, we would like to put the aspects of myth within the intangible cultural heritage. Within the mountain we have so many wetlands as well as ponds which provide the community with water sources throughout the whole year. Even in times of droughts, these will never dry out. To protect these wetlands, the community, or rather the tradition has it that they are inhabited by mermaids so whoever would want to cultivate or would want to destroy is said to be dragged by mermaids. So, this action keeps the wetlands within such a good and sustainable manner. You will see on the slides to follow how the wetlands look like even in terms of bad weather as well as in terms of drought. For the moment, we look at legends. It is said that spirits and the ancestral people of the land exist and they live within the mountain, so each and every individual is supposed to treat the mountain as well as the trees with respect. So, thereby each and every person guides these diligently. As you can see from this picture, we can see the natural water, so it’s within the mountain, as well as the trees. This picture was taken during some time in winter where there was no rainfall, but we can see that there was plenty of rain, which was coming up from the mountain, providing the people downstream with water.

Moving on to the tangible cultural heritage. As I highlighted earlier on, at the epicentre of the Zimbabwean culture is the traditional leader, chiefs in particular, who are prescribed by the Zimbabwean constitution as the soul custodians of our cultural heritage. The traditional management system within the Guruguru community tells it that the chief is supposed to oversee the way in which people interact with the environment as well as to foster and to look into the actions which the people would do to the [INAUDIBLE].

The chief has the power to find whoever cuts down trees within that particular mountain as it is considered sacred to the whole community.

Furthermore, the indigenous knowledge system plays a vital role. Let me put it in this way: When it is time of drought, the local community adapts to that particular system and they grow small grains, traditional grains within the Zimbabwean context which require very low rainfall. They grow smaller grains like sorghum and millet. This in turn ensures that the community would have some sense of [INAUDIBLE] a lot of food to sustain them throughout the whole year even if the rainfall is not that much high. So, we can see really the effect or rather the cultural aspect which is playing a part in climate really to make sure that we have climate resilience within the whole community.

So, the role of culture on climate change is a serious issue we should be giving a global attention. There is a reasonable doubt that there [INAUDIBLE] on the issue. And we can see that globally culture has been viewed of lesser implication towards eradicating the effects of climate change or rather, it is now high time whereby we include it and we measure it, that it has a role to play as we have seen through this case which I have highlighted. I thank you.

Hannah: Tawanda and Albert, thank you so much. That was really interesting to hear. I think I am going to hand back to Jordi now. Jordi, are you there? Is your microphone working? Can we hear from you?

Jordi: Yes, I am still here.

Hannah: Hi Jordi, I will hand back to you to wrap up.

Jordi: Firstly, congratulations to all the speakers. You were all wonderful and we have learned a lot from you all. Thank you very much. And second, you have noticed the speakers and also the audience that we have a lot of things to do. You share with me, you share with us that unless culture is explicitly considered, the other three dimensions of sustainability cannot be achieved. We are connecting and we are also providing freedoms. We are widening freedoms of people living on this earth, our earth, Mother Earth and we need to struggle so that this earth is more democratic and also finds another the balance between us and the rest of the species that live in this beautiful planet. Stay connected and please work together with the Climate Heritage Network. And final words for our coordinator, Andrew Potts, thank you for making this possible. And we carry on. Thank you, Hannah.

Hannah: Thank you and thank you to everyone for sticking with us and particularly to Rachel and the team for navigating their way through some technical challenges that I think we haven’t faced. We’ve been fortunate not to face them in this. I think it has been an absolutely fabulous series and I have thoroughly enjoyed being here and listening to some really extraordinary range of speakers over the past few weeks. As I said at the beginning, the recordings will be available and I would urge you to take a look and go and explore the resources that are there now, so… if you haven’t been able to attend them previously. And I think it is safe to say that these are issues that we will be revisiting. As Jordi said, and as many of the speakers have said, we have an awful lot to do but I think we can certainly make some pretty impressive progress when we pull together and the Climate Heritage Network is really helping demonstrate how that might be possible. I am going to stop talking now. Just to say, there will be information coming up about this. The recording of this session will be shared with you and we do have further presentations on this topic to come, so watch this space. And Rachel, I’m going to hand back to you to close the session now.