Leading Resilience
Preparing, adjusting and planning ahead
The Leading Resilience programme addresses the cultural sector’s need to build resilience to unavoidable climate and environmental changes. There are two activity strands:
- Adapting Culture, open to portfolio organisations and the wider sector
- Resilient Horizons, currently provided to participants in the Creative People and Places programme
Why should culture adapt to current and future climate change?
In the UK we’re already experiencing climate change. It is affecting our infrastructure, health, food security, and ecosystems – and those least responsible for emissions suffer the most. Cultural organisations have the opportunity to make meaningful change to how we live, work, and relate to each other.
The cultural community needs to consider how to adapt while preserving and caring for our buildings, stories, and cultural heritage. By using culture’s unique power to build connection and empathy, we can find creative and collaborative approaches to society’s challenges. We can make positive changes that prioritise justice, connection, and wellbeing to create a fairer, more resilient future for everyone.
Adapting Culture
To build a sustainable and future-focused cultural sector, we must adapt to the changes that will come as the climate warms. The pathway to this is through ‘adaptation’. This can be defined as ‘actions to reduce vulnerability to the current and expected impacts of climate change’, such as heatwaves, flooding, and sea-level rise. These impacts threaten cultural buildings, their audiences and communities. This makes adaptation crucial for both protecting and transforming the cultural economy – both physical structures and the people who define these spaces.
Our Adapting Culture workshops and webinars enable participants to build awareness and understanding of climate change adaptation, focusing on actions at individual, organisational, and governance levels.
We will explore how we might adapt our buildings and venues, operations and infrastructure, policies and strategies. Through workshops and peer sharing sessions we’ll look at interconnections between climate resilience, nature and place-making, and the role of culture in shaping and transforming communities and places.
Other free Arts Council England programmes that include sessions on strategies for adaptation include:
- Transforming Energy – an emissions reduction programme for building-based organisations
- Board Environmental Champions – exploring adaptation and resilience at governance level
Are you a cultural organisation or independent creative practitioner interested in joining the programme? Please sign up to the Arts Council England Environmental Programme Newsletter to receive updates.
The programme is open to portfolio organisations and the wider sector.
Climate change is going to look and feel different everywhere. Each place is unique, which means that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to adapting and building resilience: we have to be creative.
Resilient Horizons
Adapting to climate change needs locally-led solutions, tailored to communities. By focusing on the specific contexts of people and places, we can address the root causes of vulnerability. We must value each community’s diverse experience, skills and knowledge to empower those most affected.
Through Resilient Horizons, we are collaborating with grassroots cultural organisations from Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme (CPP) to explore how creativity can connect with, and deepen understanding of, local contexts. We are co-creating adaptation responses with communities to make positive changes towards creating more resilient places in a changing climate.
We are working with organisations participating in the Creative People and Places programme that are already addressing climate-related issues in towns, cities, and rural areas facing socioeconomic and health inequalities. Projects are building skills in food growing, gardening, and designing accessible green spaces.
The Resilient Horizons programme is closed to new applications, but we will share knowledge gained and examples of initiatives that organisations can apply to their own adaptation plans. This includes:
- Useful resources to share with the sector
- Blogs, case study and best-practice examples
- Tools to inspire cultural organisations’ own responses to climate impacts they may face in their locality.
Visit our adaptation resources page, and sign up to our newsletter to receive new resources and insights as they’re published.
Get in touch
We are looking for creative examples of climate adaptation responses. If you are a cultural organisation, artist, or network leading, exploring or testing out ideas in this area we are keen to build relationships with you. We would be delighted to share your work, whether it is in your operations, buildings, events, or community.
If you would like to develop a case study with us to share knowledge/best-practice with peers, or share any relevant events, talks, or programmes you are involved in with our networks and on our social channels, please contact us.
