Adaptation planning

Climate change is already happening. We need to adapt our organisations, our lives and our communities to become more resilient to the impacts and changes that are coming with it. This means changing the way we work and doing different things. Climate adaptation is a complex and ever-changing topic.

Essential role in adaptation

We believe arts and culture has an essential role to play in adaptation. Since 2018, we have been developing projects, resources and ideas about adaptation, and supporting the cultural sector to understand it. As with much of our climate work, it is two-sided, in that organisations will need to adapt themselves, but also support and influence their audiences and communities to adapt.

This was at the core of our first adaptation project Cultural Adaptations, which was an EU-funded partnership project across four cities: Glasgow, Gothenburg, Ghent and Dublin.

The project asked:

How must our culture adapt to the impacts of climate change? And how can culture and creativity help create a positive future?

We worked with policy makers, artists, cultural organisations and climate organisations to answer this question. We developed a Cultural Adaptations website with articles and resources, including two toolkits: ‘Embedded Artist Projects for Adaptation’ and ‘Adapting our Culture’. We also held an online conference in March 2021 to share the project’s results and tools. There is a Cultural Adaptations showcase on Vimeo with videos made for the project and of the conference sessions.

Adaptation training

In 2023, we engaged Verture (or Sniffer as it was at the time), Scotland’s climate resilience charity, which leads on Adaptation Scotland, to deliver some training to Culture for Climate Scotland’s team.

We then worked with them to develop two training sessions for cultural organisations across Scotland. We had more than 70 attendees at each one showing just how relevant adaptation is for organisations in Scotland.

You can watch recordings on Vimeo: Introduction to adaptation part 1 and Introduction to adaptation part 2.

Adaptation learning set

We wanted to ensure that our ‘Adapting our Culture’ toolkit was still useful and relevant to the organisations we work with, so we developed a learning set to go through it. A learning set is a peer-to-peer learning exchange where a group of people collectively evaluate a tool or method. Two sets of organisations went through our toolkit across six months, taking it into their own organisations. They then shared their organisation’s experience of it space and how it could be improved with other members of the learning set.

What did we learn?

We learnt so much from this process. The key learning is that the toolkit alone is not enough. Organisations need further resources to really embed this thinking: training sessions, example adaptation plans, short-form videos, opportunities to check in with us, more opportunities to collaborate with each other.

The learning set provided a space to question, challenge and think critically about the way we discuss adaptation. Throughout the toolkit we spoke about the ‘opportunities’ that come with adaptation, the set had different ideas about what opportunities mean, and whether it feels like an outdated term considering the crisis we are in. Some took it to mean capitalising on climate change and the disasters that come with it. Others took it to mean opportunities to build a better world, to transform the way we do things and to adapt our organisations to ecological ones that consider community, care and justice throughout our programmes. This second framing is the one we want to lead on and the one we think the cultural sector can play a key role in supporting to happen.

Thinking about this work was often difficult, thinking directly about how the changes to our climate may impact audiences and staff felt overwhelming, but the process of a peer network built a sense of solidarity, a shared language, and an understanding that we must collaborate and work together, that no organisation can face this crisis alone.

Resources

A condensed version of the ‘Adapting our Culture’ toolkit for organisations with less time and capacity.
A bank of adaptation plan examples from organisations across Scotland. Available to download from Dropbox.

We are continuing to make adaptation planning a focus of our work as it is fundamental to climate action, Creative Scotland’s Climate Emergency and Sustainability Plan and how wider society shapes a future Scotland.