Climate museums: powering action

ABSTRACT

Innovative museums dedicated to climate change have opened over the past decade. At the same time, increasing numbers of established museums are rethinking their missions and activities to refocus on care of nature and its people, using diverse approaches and methods. While the museum sector has only recently started to draw together in more interlaced conversations about shared goals in the face of the climate crisis, there is nevertheless a notable degree of cohesion of mission across these institutions as they face the shared global challenge. The missions and activities of five climate museums in Bremerhaven, Hong Kong, Rio, New York and Olso are explored, finding high levels of audience reach and impact. This paper focuses on the ways these museums are helping people to understand, care about and act on the climate crisis, stepping up to local and global collective efforts to bring the changes we need.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• museums
• museum missions
• climate action
• climate museums

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which the research and writing of this paper took place, the Gadigal and Darug people, of the Eora Nation. Many thanks to the directors and staff of the museums discussed here who supplied crucial data on approach, programmes and audience reach: Filip Wätjen (Bremerhaven); Cecilia Lam and George Ma (Hong Kong); Miranda Massie, Saskia Randle and Tim Slater (New York); and George Main (Canberra).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Jenny Newell manages Climate Change Projects at the Australian Museum, Sydney. Newell became increasingly concerned about climate change while working with Pacific communities in curatorial roles at the British Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. Now, she is focused on galvanizing engagement in the climate crisis through museums. Her books include Pacific Art in Detail; Trading Nature: Tahitians, European and Ecological Exchange and, as co-editor, Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change and Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis. She convenes the Museums and Climate Change Network.

Notes

1 The MoCC Ambassadorship that trained two groups of CUHK students to be tour guides has engaged 35 young people (Ma 2020c). The Team MoCC programme trained 44 secondary school students to run school-based environmental activities and projects (starting in 2018, final surveys run April 2019). Surveying of their responses to the programme on their understandings and their willingness to make changes to their lifestyle to reduce carbon emissions showed an average of 83% of programme participants showed an increase in climate knowledge, 8% the same level, and 9% performed less well. An average of 91% of the students reported increasing their time on in four categories of action: ‘reading information, discussing with peers, attending activities and engaging on social media’ (Ma 2020c).

2 Cecilia Lam spoke in the opening session of the 2019 ICOM General Conference in Kyoto, in the ‘Curating Sustainable Futures Through Museums’ panel discussion, for an audience of 4,600 museum professionals (Lam 2019). Most recently, Matthew Pang presented online at the Klimahaus’s International Symposium, ‘How to … ? From Climate Knowledge to Climate Action’, in the session ‘Climate Museums and their approaches around the world’.