The Climate Heritage Network (CHN) Working Group 4’s (WG4) purpose is to aid the mainstreaming of arts, culture, and heritage into climate action plans, adaptation frameworks, and other local, regional, and national planning instruments.

In 2020, WG4 designed its main project, Cultural Heritage in Climate Planning (HiCLIP), which consisted of three main stages. Identification of climate plans mainstreaming culture and heritage, developing a methodology for analysing the integration of cultural factors in climate plans, and testing the method in a pilot project.

CHN will utilise the identification by HiCLIP of policy gaps and good practice for addressing the cultural dimensions of climate change to inform mobilisation of the sector for Climate Action. HiCLIP aims to develop a global observatory on the different ways in which cultural factors are included and treated in ‘climate governance,’ i.e. the institutional organisation and coordination of sectors through adaptation and mitigation policies.
A global observatory on the treatment of cultural factors in climate planning over time will:
1) evidence the entry points to policymakers, experts and practitioners concerned with culture to collaborate to develop coherent and meaningful climate action;
2) help to orient climate policies and actions in ways that consider local context and actively involve local communities through heritage elements and practices; and
3) provide a systematic baseline for the comparative analysis across governance levels and scales and identify best practices.

This webinar will present lessons learned from a pilot study where WG4 volunteers applied the HiCLIP methodology to nine climate adaptation plans from eight countries. These plans covered national, regional and local (municipal/city) scales and were in 3 European languages. The webinar will briefly outline the HiCLIP methodology and then focus on presenting and discussing the state of the practice resulting from a systematic empirical analysis. Conclusions address what current climate strategies and actions are required from policymakers, the cultural sector and climate action planners in order to move us towards sustainable climate action. We will also discuss potential opportunities and limitations of the method and elaborate on how cultural heritage may help transcend silo mentality and facilitate interdisciplinary/inter-sectoral climate action.