Briony is co-creating climate action through arts and culture

There is evidence that site-specific climate arts and locally-rooted stories of living with water and flood can help make global climate issues meaningful to audiences. Much of this work has focused on climate communication – including the role of storytelling. Far less has been said about arts for anticipatory climate action. There are also very few large-scale studies evaluating the effectiveness of these approaches in driving behavioural change and building climate resilience.

At the same time, the potential of place-based, historically-informed approaches to facilitate action for climate empowerment has not been fully investigated. A handful of existing studies use recent flood memories, but none have made use of pre-twentieth century histories of living with water and flood in order to drive climate resilient actions today. And this despite the fact that city planners and global policy makers advocating for nature-based and ‘slow water’ solutions are drawing on past water management practices as models for contemporary schemes.

It is these research and policy gaps that the work I lead addresses.

The term ‘learning histories’ was first developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the mid-1990s as a way of reflecting on the past in order to drive organisation learning and transformation. We borrowed and developed this term. For us, learning histories are multiple, jointly told stories, necessarily collaborative and creative. They fold together past, present and future in productive ways, so as to learn from the past to rethink the present and change the future.

This folding together happens in two main ways. Firstly, in the sense that place-based histories and stories are mobilised in the creative engagement activities, where they act as a hook for conversations about living with water and future climate change, as well as provide potential models for rethinking our future relationships with water and flood. They also help make big narratives about global climate change locally meaningful and relevant – and thus, drive behavioural change, anticipatory action and community-led climate solutions.

And secondly, in the sense that the conversations that took place in and around the engagement activities were themselves generative of further watery stories and experiences. These then contribute to the corpus of knowledge, understanding and experience within the team, our participants and wider community about histories and futures of living with and alongside water and flood. In this sense, our learning histories approach can be usefully understood as a participatory research method and novel addition to the toolkit for building climate action, empowerment and resilience.

Short answer, yes!

We could give lots of examples of how we’ve successfully used learning histories in creative and/or arts-led engagement for climate action – from site-responsive theatrical performances at global climate summits to small-scale community engagement projects using textiles, creative writing and visual arts. Each of these has involved different relationships with creative partners and community participants. Each also offered different opportunities for assessing the effectiveness of our interventions amongst participants and audiences.

But to focus here on one project and its outcomes.  In the FloodLights project, we used large-scale public art as a tool for driving climate awareness and action. FloodLights consisted of three site-responsive, multimedia light and sound installations shown over four nights in October 2021 in Hull city centre, and attended by an audience of c. 11,000. We worked with project partners Absolutely Cultured, Yorkshire Water and the Living with Water Partnership, and some fantastic artists and creatives – poet Vicky Foster, multimedia creative studio Hidden Orchestra, Studio McGuire, and Barret Hodgson of Vent Media.