This year, we at Creative Carbon Scotland have once again been supporting 121 Creative Scotland Regularly Funded Organisations (RFOs) to fulfil the environmental requirements of their funding. With the recently declared Climate Emergency and net zero emissions targets, our work has never been so topical.

New this year!

2019 has been the first year we have worked with organisations receiving funding from the City of Edinburgh Council’s Culture Fund to support them in their first year of creating carbon management plans, which are now required by their funding. It’s been great to welcome these organisations on board and help them think through the specific challenges they face.

Last year, all of the RFOs were asked to develop a three-year plan to manage and, ideally, reduce their carbon emissions and this year we used an online survey to ask them to give us an update on how their plans were progressing. We also collected the annual emissions data (from utilities, water, waste and travel) for last year (2018-19), which all RFOs have been required to record and report since 2016.

Having access to emissions data at the same time as information about carbon management plans meant we could give more detailed and specific feedback, looking at each organisation’s plan to reduce their emissions in the context of their current carbon footprint. Each individual feedback report charted a breakdown of the organisation’s emissions, gave a qualitative evaluation of how their carbon management plan addresses their footprint and evaluated plans on how realistic, relevant, and ambitious they were.

One hundred and fifteen organisations have provided all the information we asked for with only a very small number of organisations still finishing their environmental work for this year. Some organisations have seen less progress than they had hoped for, but a large majority of organisations are on track or exceeding targets in the carbon management plans they put in place in 2018. Most are reducing emissions and almost all have positive stories to tell about more qualitative and structural progress within organisations. All the reporting organisations see their carbon management plans as active documents informing their practices and many of these organisations have been actively contributing to the Green Arts community across Scotland for years, as we have learned during our interactions with Green Champions and colleagues over the past few months.

“The carbon management plan has taken a serious and worrying issue and turned it into a message of hope, empowering staff to feel that our actions can make a significant difference.” RFO, 2019

Interesting facts and figures about emissions reported

Now we’ve been gathering data since 2015, we’re able to build an increasingly clear picture of what emissions look like for Creative Scotland RFOs over the past four years. We classify organisations by type and use the data to help us provide them with appropriate resources and support.

Lots of factors have changed over the years:

• There are more RFOs collecting and reporting emissions data
• Organisations are better at collecting data (there are more data and they’re more accurate)
• More of our electricity is coming from renewable sources so electricity is less carbon intensive, meaning less kgCO2e per kWh of electricity
• There have been some impressive efforts by larger organisations to reduce gas and electricity use

Despite more organisations reporting that all adds up to a general downward trend in emissions for the whole group in all areas apart from travel. Reducing emissions from flights in particular remains a challenge for everyone in the arts community as we strive to lower our emissions while maintaining the world class nature of what Scotland creates and the global recognition we receive.

Every organisation has different priorities and does different work – even from year to year, so we don’t spend time comparing them with each other or creating competition. We’re (actually) all learning together, after all. However, it might be interesting to see the average carbon footprint for 2018-19 for each organisation type.

Organisation Type	Average carbon footprint 2018-19	Number of reporting organisations
Theatres	286 tonnes CO2e	14
Arts Centres	65 tonnes CO2e	29
Tenants	43 tonnes CO2e	67

Who’s doing what?

Here are some actions that a number of organisations are taking as part of their Carbon Management Plans

• Rolling out LED replacements for more efficient lighting
• Replacing boilers with more efficient models
• Fitting secondary glazing on windows where double glazing isn’t an option
• Investment in electric vehicles
• Not flying for work within the UK (some organisations take this wider to not flying within Europe) and encouraging visitors to do the same

We are also very happy to see a spread of innovative projects engaging with audiences, artists and staff around climate change themes, and dealing with the specific areas some organisations work in.

Paragon Ensemble are about to start on their project ‘Whoosh!’ creating new music inspired by renewable energy, while specifically measuring and minimising the carbon emissions from the project itself.

Scottish Sculpture Workshop are starting their project to examine the sustainability of supply chains for the materials their artists use.

Organisations based at Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) are part of an active and successful Green Team, supporting each other to make lower carbon choices and understand their environmental impact

It has been a busy time for both Creative Carbon Scotland and all the RFOs getting all of this information , collecting, analysing and feeding back on all of the data but we continue to learn and get better at making great art sustainably.  Creative projects like this show us that carbon reduction can be an opportunity rather than a barrier.

Carbon management for all!

For support on your own carbon management, whether you work for an RFO or not, please have a look at our carbon management pages, which describe the process of effective carbon management at any level, and provide a number of useful tools and resources.

The post Blog: Round-up of emissions and carbon reporting 2019 appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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We’re looking for board members who want to do something about the climate emergency!

REPAIREL CIC is a new social enterprise created to respond to the climate emergency at a local and actionable level and we are looking for new people to join our board of directors. It is an opportunity to join us at this exciting startup stage and directly participate in shaping our organisation and make a real impact.

REPAIREL’s first aim is to create an environmentally conscious Shoe Repair Hub/Lab in the North West of Glasgow that will help people break away from the throwaway culture of buying and discarding shoes, reduce shoe waste and facilitate innovation and circular design practices through three interlinked elements joined together in one creative space:

1. Repair Hub: Providing access to shoe repair equipment and support for people to repair their OWN shoes and extend their lifespan.
2. Sustainable Fashion: Accepting shoe donations, fixing shoes that are repairable and repurposing those that are beyond repair to make our own sustainable shoe collection.
3. Fab Lab: facilitating digital fabrication and rapid prototyping within a small-scale workshop, democratising access to the tools, education and resources for invention and manufacturing, rethinking supply chains and exploring how communities can be powered by technology at the grassroots level.

Why shoe waste is a problem: The apparel and footwear industries together account for more than 8% of the global climate impacts, more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. Footwear represents approximately one-fifth of that, about 1.5% of global climate impacts and accounts for 700 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Some 300 million pairs of shoes are sold each year within the UK alone. Sadly, most of them end up in landfills, where an average pair takes more than fifty years to decompose, releasing chemicals from the glues and rubbers into the environment, when they could be repaired, reused or repurposed.

For our board, we are looking for people from a wide range of backgrounds and skillsets. Read: For more detailed person specification, additional information and on how to apply.

The post Opportunity: REPAIREL CIC is looking for board members appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

CliMates podcast – now available!
Brought to you by Hazel Darwin-Clements.

• How do we talk about climate breakdown with each other?
• What are people doing, thinking and feeling about it?
• How are people experiencing their own internal journey?
• How are we coming together?
• Where is the hope?
• What are the threads that run through these conversations?
• What can I do with the power that I have?
• Can I really accept that we can’t save the world?

I set myself the challenge of having 100 conversations about climate change with my friends, friends of friends, my family, their friends, their dogs (not really), folk I met on the bus (ok, again not really) and pretty much anyone who would talk about it with me (really!). I’ve edited the conversations together to share all the best bits with you.

There will be 10 episodes over 10 weeks (beginning 27th November 2019). It’s recommended to start at the beginning, there’s an arc. (We might need one.)

LINKS
https://climates.captivate.fm/
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/climates/id1489446806

The post Podcast: 100 conversations about climate change appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

On a wet and wild evening on the 10th of December 2019, almost a hundred people gathered together to share their plans for COP26, discuss their goals, and make new connections and plans, accompanied by cocktails and snacks. This page records the speakers and discussion and provides links for further resources and information.

COP26 will be the 26th annual UN climate conference, probably the most important gathering on climate change since the Paris Agreement (2015). For COP26 decision makers from governments around the world will converge on Glasgow to measure progress and set targets for the future. In addition COPs have become a flashpoint for environmental protests and civic engagement – as well as fossil fuel lobbying. This event provided an opportunity to hear speakers present their plans for the COP and space for free-form discussion and opportunities to record ideas on whiteboards positioned around the room.

Our Speakers

Recordings of all the speakers are available as a podcast.

Ben Twist from Creative Carbon Scotland kicked off the evening with some reflections on his experiences of creative engagement with COPs in the past. He emphasised some of the challenges that need to be overcome, such as:

• getting access to the COP itself, or even close to its venues, especially given that most of the decisions announced at each COP will have already been made in advance.
• the problems with getting a message through during the COP itself given the many other events and news stories to compete with.
• the difficulty overcoming the divide between artistic interventions and the actual negotiations that take place at the COP, with the potential for these to barely interact.
• how to engage members of the public and show what they can actually do.

Ben stressed that arts and culture do have a lot to offer as a means of engaging international and local communities or decision makers and can take advantage of the spike in awareness that will come with the presence of the COP to spread their reach more widely, especially during the run-up to the COP. He recommended subscribing to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin as a means of keeping up to speed with developments and looking at Season for Change as a planned major programme of artistic engagement with COP26. He also recommended attending the Creative Carbon Scotland Cultural Adaptations conference taking place in Glasgow just before COP26.

Chris Fremantle from ecoartscotland followed this with a different approach, involving attendees in a performance of an extract from eco-artists Helen and Newton Harrison’s Lagoon Cycle. He also quoted Helen Harrison in saying

‘Our work begins when we perceive an anomaly in the environment that is the result of opposing beliefs or contradictory metaphors. Moments when reality no longer appears seamless and the cost of belief has become outrageous offer the opportunity to create new spaces – first in the mind and thereafter in everyday life.’

and discussed their idea of the ‘Urgency of the Moment’, emphasising that decisions made within this ten-year period will have repercussions over a far longer time-span.

We then heard elevator pitches from:

• Stop Climate Chaos Scotland is a coalition of around 50 NGOs, charities, and community organisations around Scotland who are coordinating a wider coalition of civil society organisations working towards COP26. They are creating a network of hosts to look after people coming to the COP from abroad and are organising a civil society hub around Charing Cross Glasgow that will be open for anyone to use. They are also creating an online platform that will allow organisations to publicise what they are doing. Nick stressed the importance of arts organisations sharing space with scientific or environmental organisations and of facilitating greater diversity than will be present within the COP itself. He recommended joining their mailing list to keep up to date.
• Manchester Science Festival is organised by the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry and is specifically targeted at audiences without particular science expertise. The 2020 instalment will focus on the theme of climate change science and making the subject engaging and real for non-specialists using the question ‘How do we change how we live?’. They are interested in bringing the work organised as part of this festival to Glasgow as part of the COP and  co-commissioning work.
• Glasgow National Park City is a volunteer-run organisation seeking to have Glasgow follow in the footsteps of London by becoming a ‘National Park City’ to emphasise the importance of green spaces and wildlife as an essential part of a sustainable city and facilitate connections between different environmental projects in Glasgow, allowing them to build pressure on decisions makers from the grassroots. They aim to use COP26 as a means of publicising and growing this idea, emphasising the importance of cities for sustainable living in the future.
• Creative Climate Symposium is a planned two-day symposium bringing together academics, scientists, artists, and designers to foreground the importance of sustainable design, using the presence of COP26 as an opportunity to bring people together. They are also in conversation with Glasgow School of Art,Zero Waste Scotland and RSA Scotland to develop a design residency leading into the symposium.
• Ellie Harrison is an artist and activist whose work has frequently engaged with the climate crisis and travel, looking at ways to improve public transport in order to reduce inequality and carbon emissions. She is looking to use COP26 to highlight the integrated public transport campaign ‘Get Glasgow Moving‘, particularly trying to get public transport made free in Glasgow for the ten days during COP26 and organising a car free day. She will also be bringing an art project called Early Warning Signs back to Glasgow and is looking for venues to ‘adopt’ a sign for the duration of the COP.
• RSPB’s ‘Giving nature a home in Glasgow’ project are working in partnership with Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and are looking to focus their work in 2020 on COP26, planning events for British Science Week in March, working with the Natural History Museums Network, and hoping to put on a collaborative art project with local communities. They are also involved in organising ‘City Nature Challenge’, an international competition to record as many species within an urban environment as possible, at the end of April. They are planning a youth conference in October, bringing together young people from communities across Glasgow to discuss how to make local communities better for people and nature.
• Brendan Hill of Edinburgh data visualisation meetup group talked about their plans to run a conference on data visualisation to coincide with the conference, which will include an associated exhibition featuring creative means of presenting climate change data. He also discussed plans to put on an open air theatrical performance as a means of articulating clearly the state of climate crisis.
• Dundee City of Design were unable to make it on the night due to bad weather but are looking for collaborators for their ‘The Future We Want’ project. This will be a large scale global event, produced and curated by young people from across the UNESCO Creative City network, culminating in a parade and exhibition of placards and banners made with the help of professional artists and writers,

You can listen to a recording of these talks as a podcast.

Artist, Julia Barton also sent us a video about her plans for the COP with a call for collaborators, which can be viewed below:

Glasgow COP26 pitch by Julia Barton. @LittoralArt. Please share from Julia Barton on Vimeo.

Notes made during the discussion

Some of the most important themes to come out of the discussion were:

• The importance of planning engagement events in the lead-up to and after the COP itself to take advantage of a spike in awareness. Zero Waste Scotland, Glasgow Science Centre, RSPB, Scottish Youth Theatre, and others are planning for this.
• The brief period during COP26 was agreed by many to be a more appropriate time for creative protests or hosting alternative or ‘people’s’ events.
• There was strong agreement that work should have a strong Climate Justice angle and involve working with minorities that are being most affected by climate change.
• There was somewhat of a divide between those who wanted to focus on engaging ‘ordinary’ members of the public and those who wanted to influence those in positions of power: decision makers, businesses, finance. Both of these are important, but they require very different approaches so having a good understanding of who your work is aimed at is clearly essential.
• There was a lot of interest in collaborating across disciplines as a means of reaching new people or sharing ideas in new ways. This will require good communication and an understanding of the differing agendas that people might have coming from different backgrounds.

Original images:

Below is a transcript of the images for easier reading. Pluses (+) indicate where others have shown their agreement with an idea using ticks or stars.

When are you planning for?

Before the COP

• Around July:
  • National tour Scottish Youth Theatre National Ensemble new theatre work on climate change
• Around October:
  • Junior COP
  • End Oct exhibition
  • ‘Sense of here’ exhibition opening in Cumbria
  • CCA
  • Model UN (Glasgow Science Centre), Citizen science
  • Tie in with COP-in-Italy pre-event
• Zero Waste Scotland: series of events raising awareness of the role of ‘consumption emissions’ in climate emergency
• Glasgow science centre run a series of workshops on weather, climate, climate change for community groups so people can engage with topics/politics/activism globally and locally
• Glasgow Science centre ’Our World’ adult science late
• Video speaking to people on the street about their climate change big issues. Play this at the COP.

During the COP

• Conference and exhibition on visualising climate change
• Large scale street theatre/climate change demonstration (thing Olympic opening ceremony)
• Youth hub at Scottish Youth Theatre studios (Merchant City)
• Artistic demonstration as close as possible to SEC urging decision makers to commit to more meaningful action. This worked with the Scottish Climate Bill! (Contact Glasgow Science Centre)
• Using community spaces for debate and rest <3 Museums <3
• Make placards and distribute
• CCA

After the COP

• Around January:
  • COP/Cumbria and overlapping Here’s event at Cumbria uni
  • Build on climate consciousness boom to influence businesses to change
• How do we feed into Scottish Government and Glasgow City cultural policies?

Who do you want to work with?

• Museums
• Community energy groups (e.g. Glasgow community energy)
• Film makers
• Musicians
• Heritage organisations
• Festivals (Glasgow, Edinburgh) +
• Extinction Rebellion
• Friends of the Earth (Scotland)
• Art not Oil Groups (e.g. BP or not BP)
• Collaborators for exhibition- public engagement in climate issues
• Woodland Trust and similar
• Policy Makers
• Minorities ++
• Community groups +
• Academics
• Glasgow Science Centre
• Artists
• Schools +
• Cultural Innovators
• Indigenous peoples
• Like-minded international networks

What are the most important issues to work on?

[It looks like somebody leaned on this one so I’ve reconstructed what I can]

• Carbon footprint target in line with net zero target (ie consumption and production emissions accounting) (75% of emissions related to consumption of resources, and 50% of those emissions produced abroad) (Zero Waste Scotland) +
• Widespread acceptance of the reality of a low carbon society +++
• Language and awareness: what is climate/climate change, why it matters to all of us
• Climate justice and awareness of the climate debt owed by rich countries to the global south and marginalised people. Stronger carbon reduction targets for developed countries and compensation to developing countries +++++
• Cultural regeneration [in areas historically connected with oil production], e.g. Aberdeen, Shetland
• Communicate the facts – Science Library
• Advice – what can people actually do
• Divestment
• Making climate change accessible for all audiences
• [Connecting to] things that ‘feel’ more important right now – austerity etc.
• CCA open for partnerships

Who do you want to influence?

• Younger generation: kids, teens, young adults ¹ +
• Governments and public institutions ++
• Financial institutions +
• Business community and management organisations ++
• The people currently in/with power [pointing to previous three]
• Communities – everyday people +
• Other artists around the world and festivals
• Consumers
• ‘We are a world of altruists led by psychopaths’. These people [arrow to ‘altruists’] to overcome these people [arrow to ‘psychopaths’].

What are your goals?

• To use digital arts and social media as a tool for collective and inclusive climate action across Glasgow +
• To integrate art for cross disciplinary discussions
• Play a role in behavioural change
• Make public feeling tangible so politicians and corporations find the pressure to act irresistible
• To give young artists a platform to be heard +
• Making the ripples spread out further +
• To reduce business’s climate impact in Glasgow
• To raise awareness and action, reducing consumption related emissions
• Create exhibition to engage general public on climate issues
• To inform accessibly, organisations and public

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Green Tease

Green Tease is a network and ongoing informal events programme, connecting creative practices and environmental sustainability across Scotland.  Creative Carbon Scotland runs the Green Tease Open Call, which is a funded opportunity supporting sustainability practitioners and artists to exchange ideas, knowledge and practices with the aim of building connections and widening understanding of the role of arts in influencing a more sustainable society.

The post Green Tease Reflections: COP Tales and Cocktails appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

This page documents the speakers at a Green Tease event we held in September 2019, looking at the role of islands and island communities in relation to environmental issues through the contributions of two islander poets, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Roseanne Watt.

We also heard from Mairi Davies of Historic Environment Scotland who demonstrated the connections between the issues raised in the poetry and their work here in Scotland. The event sought to interrogate issues of climate justice – island communities are among those least responsible for climate change but are facing its effects first – as well as the role poetry can have for engaging with environmental issues.

Film, part 1: Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (who appeared via videolink) is a Marshallese poet, environmental campaigner and teacher of Pacific Studies who spoke at the 2014 UN Climate Leaders Summit in New York. Her most recent poetry collection Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter was published in 2017. Kathy presented two of her video poems, Anointed and Dear Matafele Peinam.

Film, part 2: Roseanne Watt and Mairi Davies

Roseanne Watt is a Shetland-born poet who writes in a mixture of English and Shetland dialect and often works with combinations of words and film. Her debut poetry collection Moder Dy (Mother Wave) was published earlier this year. Roseanne read a selection of poems from Moder Dy and presented a video poem, Kishie Wife.

Mairi Davies is Climate Change Manager at Historic Environment Scotland and an expert in coastal adaptation.

Discussion

The event included with small-group discussion, which have not been included in the film. Some of the most interesting points that came out of the discussion were:

• Poetry is often concerned with ‘amplifying’ experience, feelings, or issues. Likewise environmentalists in Scotland should be trying to amplify the messages coming from communities already facing climate change impacts.
• The value of poetry in engaging with environmental issues may come from its ability to draw connections between personal experiences and wider issues in a way that is often difficult for environmental writing to achieve. Both poets work comes from their connection to a specific place and culture but it speaks to audiences from outside of these.
• As island communities are among the first to face severe climate change impacts they are among those best placed to conceptualise innovative solutions and should be listened to.
• We need to find a way of expressing the value of poetry beyond communication, but also as a different means of understanding, as a way to engage people in a new way, or even as a form of therapy for dealing with ‘climate anxiety’.

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Green Tease

Green Tease is a network and ongoing informal events programme, connecting creative practices and environmental sustainability across Scotland.  Creative Carbon Scotland runs the Green Tease Open Call, which is a funded opportunity supporting sustainability practitioners and artists to exchange ideas, knowledge and practices with the aim of building connections and widening understanding of the role of arts in influencing a more sustainable society.

The post Green Tease Reflections: Island Futures appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

On Monday 25th November 2019, delegates converged on the James Hutton Institute’s Glensaugh research farm in a remote part of Aberdeenshire to discuss the future of food.

The event was organised in collaboration with the James Hutton Institute and brought together a diverse array of their researchers with farmers, representatives from environmental and arts organisations, and independent creative practitioners. Our aim was to discuss the ways that research at the Hutton Institute ought to engage with the issue of how to reduce the environmental harm of farming and food systems and the ways that they could work with arts and culture to present their research in new ways in order to increase their reach and impact. It was also a chance for those from an arts background to benefit from their up to date research.

About the event

The day started with a few short presentations that set the scene for what challenges Scotland currently faces regarding food. The issues raised included erosion of and depletion in the quality of soil (leading to the controversial ’60 harvests left’ prediction), the destructive potential to wildlife of some of the chemicals used in farming, the damage that oversimplified large scale farming can result in by replacing biodiverse countryside with monocultures, unnecessary surpluses, and the transport emissions of importing and exporting food.

There was also discussion of the threats that climate change poses to food production worldwide, with ‘breadbasket’ being those who climate is also forecast to change the most radically, and 1 in a 100 year shocks to food production set to increase to  1 in 30 by 2040. Another issue raised was that sellers were also responsible for creating sustainable food systems. 70% of UK food is sold in supermarkets and around 100 buyers dominant the food market in the UK, meaning that finding solutions is likely to involve working with them. WWF are working with Tesco on the sustainability of their food, for example.

This was followed by presentations and debate around what the solutions to these problems are. These ranged from practical solutions that are already in use such as planting fields with mixtures of crops, avoiding leaving soil exposed by planting a covering crop over winter, avoiding driving heavy machinery over soil, and increased tree planting on farms, to research into ‘precision agriculture’ and ‘vertical farming’ that could take place in cities and independently of soil quality. One recurring theme was that of ‘regenerative agriculture’: farming that helped protect and restore soil and wildlife rather than damaging it.

During the locally-sourced lunch artist Frances Davies handed out ‘menu cards’ that presented delegates with a 25-year-old art work that engaged with farming – Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield: A Confrontation, which involved her planting, maintaining, and harvesting a field of wheat on a landfill site two blocks from Wall Street – with prompts for conversation. This intervention aimed to encourage attendees to think more broadly about their aims, how they frame their research, and creative ways of engaging people on the issues, paving the way for the more open-ended discussions later in the day.

Lunch was followed by a tour of part of the farm, which included discussion of the limited options available to farmers working on lower quality land – like 80% of Scottish farmland Glensaugh is designated ‘less favoured’ meaning that it is an ineffective context for growing most crops – and combining farming and forestry on the same land to encourage tree planting.

After the tour we heard from director and theatre-maker Lu Kemp, who discussed her play A Six Inch Layer of Topsoil and the Fact it Rains, which was based on interviews with Scottish farmers and taken on tour round village halls. The production aimed to catalyse discussions in farming communities about the future of farming and audiences were encouraged to stay and discuss their thoughts on performances after they finished. Lu also gave her thoughts on the value of the arts as a way of ‘telling stories’ and contributing to wider shifts of opinion, giving examples such as the Manhattan Theatre Club.

The final discussions of the day focused on making plans for the future including new research projects and new ways of promoting research. Suggestions included inviting artists to attend the next Hutton Institute research symposium and encouraging them to produce work in response and organising a ‘Hutton Institute Fringe’, collaborating with arts and culture to educate and engage members of the public.

Reflections

Annabel Pinker, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute and co-organiser of this event , said:

I was glad to see that there was a lot of interest and curiosity in the room about being in dialogue with artists in different ways – I think that people saw and felt the value in it. The atmosphere seemed unusually open and exploratory to me – which I think was heavily down to the presence of artists in the room. It de-stabilised the business-as-usual sorts of discussions we so often have.

The idioms used by artists and scientists are different and in any interdisciplinary setting lots of time is needed to listen and feel into the assumptions/values/logics at work in someone else’s way of seeing. So one clear take-away for me was that we need significantly more and ongoing conversations between researchers and artists around how we might work together and what collaboration might look like.

Lu Kemp said:

Food for thought! A rare opportunity to listen to experts in a variety of fields, and to have that inform our thinking around story and public conversations. I would love to create more space for playwrights and scientists to connect, allowing their respective crafts and research to inform one another.

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Green Tease

Green Tease is a network and ongoing informal events programme, connecting creative practices and environmental sustainability across Scotland.  Creative Carbon Scotland runs the Green Tease Open Call, which is a funded opportunity supporting sustainability practitioners and artists to exchange ideas, knowledge and practices with the aim of building connections and widening understanding of the role of arts in influencing a more sustainable society.

The post Green Tease Reflections: 60 Harvests Left? appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico