What is Creative Climate Leadership?

Creative Climate Leadership is a new programme for artists and cultural professionals to explore the cultural dimensions of climate change, and take action with impact, creativity and resilience.

The success of the COP21 UN Climate Talks and the first universal agreement on climate change – the Paris Agreement – has called for urgent, collaborative and distributed leadership with creativity at its heart. Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to below 2°C requires a bold rethinking of the way we live and work.

Artists and the wider cultural community have a unique and critical role: they deal with the art of the possible and influence new ways of being, doing and thinking. Creative Climate Leadership supports cultural professionals to apply these qualities to the climate challenge. The programme is tailored for participants to reach their full potential and maximise action on climate change within the creative and cultural sector, with help and support to test and scale ideas through sharing best practice and discussion across countries and cultures.

The International Creative Climate Leadership training courses will take place in London and Slovenia in 2017, with applications open from November 2016. The course is aimed at artists and cultural leaders and we welcome applications from all creative disciplines and art forms. The five-day intensive course will enable participants to apply environmental targets and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals meaningfully to their work, and explore what leadership means in the context of a rapidly changing world. The week will bring together a range of speakers sharing case studies and practical approaches to think through systemic change; share solutions for environmental sustainability from and for the cultural sector; build resilience through problem solving; engage people with new narratives through art and design; encourage behaviour change through communications and advocacy, and more. The course will prepare participants to apply their learning and new skills when they return home, and support ongoing learning and exchange through an alumni network. Participants will also have the opportunity to apply for a limited number of Creative Climate Leadership grants and mentoring opportunities to seed and support ambitious action at a local level.

Alison Tickell, Julie's Bicycle, presented Creative Climate Leadership at IETM Plenary Meeting in Valencia. Find her speech here.

Visit Creative Climate Leadership website

©Vincent Chartier