Archaeology Scotland is proud to announce its membership in the Climate Heritage Network (CHN), a global network of organisations committed to mobilising art, culture, and heritage for climate action.
The network was launched in October 2019 in Edinburgh, UK, by organisations worldwide. Founding members shared a common concern that the power of culture to drive transformative climate action was not being fully realised and a recognition that business-as-usual leads to an ever-warming globe with catastrophic consequences for the planet, its peoples, and their cultures and heritage.
The CHN aims to unlock culture’s potential by connecting cultural voices to each other and to partners across diverse artistic mediums, regional scales, and economic sectors. The new CHN members reflect this diversity. They include government bodies from the national, regional and local levels; universities and research organisations; cultural institutions; NGOs and civil society; and businesses, artists, and design professionals.
Climate change is a global phenomenon.
Members are drawn from all five of the CHN’s regions: Africa and the Arab States, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America. The CHN works to promote solidarity with communities on the frontlines of climate change.
New CHN members hail from dozens of countries, ranging from Argentina and Bangladesh to Italy and Iraq; New Zealand and Nigeria to Turkey and the United States.
Last year the CHN launched its new Action Plan for 2022-24. The Plan is based on a Theory of Change which posits that culture – from arts to heritage – enables transformative climate action by empowering people to imagine and realise low-carbon, just, climate-resilient futures.
In November, at the 2022 UN Climate Conference, COP27, the parties to the UN Climate Convention acknowledged the critical linkages between culture, heritage and climate change by including these themes in decisions they took and programs they launched addressing loss and damage, climate adaptation, and climate action in cities and urban areas. 2023 will see CHN members working to build on these successes.