Climate Heritage Network (CHN) has launched the new CHN 2022-24 Action Plan and re-launched the CHN website’.
… We invite you to review the plan today…
CHN writes:
At a global level, climate change planning is failing: failing to deliver the 1.5C pathways promised by the Paris Agreement and failing to deliver transformative adaptation for many communities. These are not our words, but the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who called the spiralling climate catastrophe a “damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”
Today the member of the Climate Heritage Network offer a corrective: a proposal for bolstering a system of climate planning that is struggling to keep 1.5°C alive and to capture hearts and minds for achieving system transitions on a nearly unprecedented scale. Today, we offer the new Climate Heritage Network Action Plan for 2022-24.
Precisely how has global climate leadership failed? A growing critique points to the scarcity of social imaginaries capable of conceiving plausible low carbon, just, climate resilient futures. And, it questions a climate policy ecosystem that emphasises a narrow suite of technological and market-based solutions while falling short at capturing systemic, uncertain, or contested factors that are less easy to model or quantify, including attention to the historical and socio-economic systems (colonialism, globalism) that have helped cause climate change.
Exclusion from climate planning finds parallels in systems of climate governance that marginalise groups such as Indigenous Peoples and local communities, women, youth, older persons, and persons with disabilities, while disregarding the world views, values, and knowledge systems that diverse stakeholders bring to the table. Where people are centred (as in demand-side energy conservation plans), they often are depicted as autonomous actors, disembodied from the cultural systems (and related spiritual and ethical dimensions) in which they operate.
The cumulative effect is to downplay rights-based, place-based, demand-side, and people-centred climate action strategies. With climatic tipping points looming, these are strategies the world cannot afford to miss – especially when the evidence shows they produce durable, sustainable climate action outcomes. How best to not only fill these gaps but transform climate planning itself – and urgently? One answer is clear: give diverse cultural voices a seat at the climate planning table.
Enabling alternative social imaginaries, revealing and guiding new and old-but-new again pathways; offering counterpoints to unsustainable paradigms of “progress;” supporting transformative reinterpretation of today’s carbonscapes and their accompanying mindsets – these are the powers of culture that the new Action Plan aims to unlock. We invite you to review the plan today. If your organisation has not done so already, please consider joining the CHN and helping us to take the Plan forward.
To reflect the importance of the Action Plan launch, today we are also re-launching the CHN webpage. The design was a labour of love donated by CHN Members around the world. Here, you can meet the members of the Climate Heritage Network, learn more about the Action Plan, and discover twelve climate policy issues areas we will be focusing on. In the coming weeks, we will be adding tools kits, a resource library, and regionally-themed pages so check back often.
These are serious times. Most emissions scenarios now show that global warming is expected to hit 1.5°C “in the early 2030s” if not sooner. This raises the prospect of “overshoot” in the next 10 years, plunging the earth into a period when risks to human systems including livelihoods and cultural and spiritual values is expected to further increase. We believe culture is a missing force that can help get climate action on track – especially if we all work together to unlock its power, from arts to heritage, to help people imagine and realise climate resilient futures. Join us!
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