2020 is expected to determine how the EU budget and its next-generation programmes will contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation efforts for the next decade. Along this line, the Parliament’s CULT Committee initiated a report on ‘Effective measures to ‘green’ the Erasmus+, Creative Europe and European Solidarity Corps programmes’.
There is a fundamental correlation between cultural practices and the ‘greening’ of our societies, however it is necessary to recognise that they both could have a positive and/or negative impact on each other.
Cultural and creative sectors can contribute to positive shifts of attitudes and practices towards a more economic, socially and environmentally sustainable future both at the individual and the societal level, as outlined by Agenda21 for Culture and fully acknowledged by the Committee of the Regions (CoR), that also pledges to work at local and regional level to reach these goals. On the other hand, Cultural and Creative Sectors’ (CCS) mobility practices and use of materials can also have negative implications for the environment: taking the EU digital agenda as an evident example, the environmental impact of the current data consumption is immense.
The EU Green Deal has the potential to provide solutions that would benefit arts, culture, education, as well as everyone, to operate in a greener and more sustainable way. But Europe’s cultural ecosystem is a fragile one, especially in this particular moment: with the huge uncertainty over the next MFF, and the already precarious state of financial affairs for culture, which struggles to cover the great variety of projects proposed every year by thousands of big and small organisations, it is fundamental that all sustainability and greening measures mainstreamed through the cultural strand of Creative Europe will not negatively impact an already oversubscribed and underfunded programme.
