Stay awhile: how culture is reimagining its role in sustainability
Last month, Culture Action Europe hosted the sixth episode of the State of Culture webinar “Culture & Sustainability,” facilitated by CAE board members Rocío Nogales and Julie Ward. Their discussion outlined the current discussions happening within the cultural sector as pertaining to sustainable development. Speaking from practitioner, policy-level and poetic perspectives, they laid out an overview of where we are as a sector and dug into what we need to move forward. Read on for insights and inspiration on culture’s role in the sustainability transition.
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“When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.”
Culture Action Europe’s State of Culture Report reveals a sector grappling with its evolving role in climate action: poised to lead yet constrained by systemic challenges. The cultural ecosystem is reshaping its relationship with sustainability, driven by data, policy, and grassroots innovation.
As found in the report, while only 17.6% of cultural organisations currently prioritise climate change, 37.8% anticipate it will dominate their work within five years—the highest projected shift among 16 fields surveyed. This gap between present action and future ambition underscores a critical tension: the sector recognises climate change as a defining challenge but struggles to align immediate practices with long-term goals.
The State of Culture Barometer further reveals that 46% of respondents agree climate action should be a core focus for cultural policy, yet current strategies lag behind. National policies in the EU often sideline environmental sustainability in favour of economic contributions or identity preservation. Exceptions like Austria’s Climate Fit Cultural Enterprises program—funding green building retrofits—and France’s 2023-2027 ecological transition guide, which mandates low-impact digital practices, hint at progress. At the EU level, the current Work Plan for Culture prioritises “Culture for the Planet,” yet flagship programs like Creative Europe lack binding climate targets. This ambivalence trickles down: for example, while the EU champions greener mobility, funding for sustainable touring remains scarce, forcing artists into impossible choices between carbon ethics and cross-border collaboration.
“I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.”
In light of these challenges, the cultural sector believes it has a larger role to play in climate action beyond just reducing its own environmental impact, with a widely agreed-upon idea that we need to harness the transformative power of culture to reimagine the foundations of societies and economies. Museums and heritage sites, for instance, are rewriting their roles. Beyond preserving artefacts, they’re reviving ancestral practices—like lime mortar techniques that restore carbon-absorbing buildings—and decolonising collections to reframe narratives around planetary boundaries. The Network of European Museum Organisation holds that these institutions must evolve into laboratories for sustainable living, stating, “Our ethical and professional priority is to work with our communities for the future sustainability of the planet. Museums have a critical role to play in environmental sustainability and imagining our possible futures. Our commitment is that we will use our diverse collections and the stories that they hold to inspire people and facilitate change.”
As noted in the State of Culture Report, heritage workers increasingly juggle roles as preservers, climate innovators, and community advocates—all while navigating budgets stretched to breaking point. This friction is echoed across the sector: arts centres fostering local food sovereignty, theatre troupes adopting low-carbon touring models, and festivals piloting circular economies—all while navigating funding landscapes that reward productivity over process.
Projects cropping up across the sector offer pathways. One of CAE’s newer projects, EMCCINNO: Supporting Sustainable Climate Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries, is aimed at helping cultural and creative industries adopt sustainable business models. Cultural and creative industries play a critical role in raising awareness and driving climate innovation, but many small and medium-sized organisations face challenges like limited resources, climate vulnerability, and a lack of integrated sustainability tools. For this reason, EMCCINNO aims to bridge this gap by providing tested, sustainable business models for cultural and artistic social enterprises, which combine artistic, social, and ecological goals.
SHIFT Culture, an eco-certification framework for cultural networks to reduce their environmental footprint, fill a gap in the environmental certification offer by taking into consideration their unique characteristics and the contexts within which cultural agents operate. With a focus on environmental impact across operations, policies, activities, and governance, SHIFT moves beyond superficial fixes to address structural drivers of unsustainability and encourages rethinking governance models to prioritise long-term ecological resilience.
“Around me, the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.”
Looking to ongoing advocacy from the cultural sector, the absence of culture as a standalone UN Sustainable Development Goal has long fueled campaigns like #Culture2030Goal, which positions culture as the “fourth pillar” of sustainability. While the 2022 MONDIACULT Declaration marked a milestone, declaring culture a “global public good”, the 2024 UN Pact for the Future backtracked, relegating culture to a footnote alongside sports. This political volatility underscores the need for persistent advocacy. This upcoming autumn, the #Culture2030Goal campaign hopes to leverage the key moment of Mondiacult 2025 to present a finalised Culture Goal draft at UNESCO’s Barcelona conference to solidify political commitment and lay groundwork for inclusion in the post-2030 development agenda.
As the State of Culture Report urges, the path forward demands policy frameworks that reward transformative, not just transactional, sustainability, funding models that support green mobility and slow, process-driven art and, finally, global advocacy to cement culture’s role in the post-2030 agenda. CAE’s recently launched campaign, Ask, Pay, Trust, calls for strategic action in the next EU Work Plan for Culture and Culture Compass that recognises these facets of the sector’s work in order to strengthen social cohesion and build trust in the role of the arts in society.
“The light flows from their branches.”
At the end of their intervention, Julie mentioned, from her work with Culture Declares Emergency, that the path forward hinges on three tenets: Tell the truth. Seek justice. Take action. The cultural sector’s greatest power lies in its ability to reimagine—not just artworks, but economies, relationships, and futures. The contribution of culture to sustainable development is both complementary and cross-cutting the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainability. As both long-term budget and agenda-setting take shape, the question isn’t whether culture belongs in sustainability agendas, but how deeply we’ll let it root there.
“And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
Poem: When I Am Among the Trees,” Mary Oliver
Photo credit: Rena