GCC: How did the book come about?

NM: I’ve spent most of my professional career in the museums and heritage sector, and I realised that museums have something potentially quite interesting to add to the wider debate about the climate and biodiversity crisis, which is that they take a long-term view. The two museums where I’ve been director - the Manchester Museum and the Horniman - actually have specimens in the collections which relate to the previous five mass extinction events on Earth.

There’s also the understanding that museums are still amongst some of the very few trusted public institutions - they always score very highly on trusted professions indexes. There is a really large audience - there are 80 to 100 million visits to museums in the UK [every year]. So they’ve got something to say about the long-term, and have trusted information, and they have to think about not just the next three years, but the next three hundred or three thousand years.

At the same time, in terms of the book, I realised that there are lots of museums reinventing the wheel, and saying we need to decarbonise or we need to engage our audiences, but how do we do it? [I wanted to] try and cut through all that.

I thought that to have a book on this could potentially be quite a useful source – and although it’s a rapidly changing field, at the same time, it’s also playing out over the long term.

GCC: What is your sense of the progress the sector has made on the issue of climate change? 

NM: Not only were museums reinventing the wheel, they were very uncoordinated. Museums are really good at declaring things, and saying they’re going to do things, but we took inspiration from GCC – because GCC is very much about practical, easy-to-follow guidance. The [UK Museum] COP was taking up that challenge.

[The COP addressed] a whole series of knotty issues, like how do you decarbonise museums in heritage buildings that are listed, where you can’t put on solar panels, and that kind of stuff. It did feel as though the sector was pretty united.

GCC: What are some of the big issues that the museums and heritage sector needs to change if it is to meet 2030 targets?

NM: I think it’s really progressing all the things that were agreed at the museum COP - so moving towards a risk-based approach to collection management, moving towards a green-first approach to shipping, all of the things GCC have been advocating for.

I think, crucially, we can’t do this on our own - there does need to be government funding to decarbonise buildings, and there does need to be a change in the government and agency policies around planning. We can’t meet our decarbonisation targets if the planning regime is not changed.

The idea is that over decades we have an incremental approach - every time there’s a refurbishment of a museum or gallery, or any other capital project, even if it’s slightly more expensive, there has to be support by funders to ensure that decarbonisation is put in - because it’ll only be more expensive to do it later. Everyone really needs a long-term roadmap.

And, finally, the big one is leadership - it can only happen if the leadership, the boards, the senior team, etc. [are on board]. Quite often, the agitation is from below, but nothing happens unless the people at the top are signed up to doing it. It’s got to take a bit of passion, commitment and vision to make it happen.

GCC: How can arts & culture play a role in fighting the climate crisis? Is there a particular responsibility there?

NM: Very much so. We know very well from lots of fairly exhaustive research now that simply giving people the facts, traditional science communication, doesn’t work, it doesn’t resonate. What does resonate is emotion, imagination, stories, and those are what artists can bring - artists of all types, not just visual artists. It’s those stories that can unlock change.

What can make a real difference are [the] audiences, which are very very large, and if you can engage an audience, in whatever way it is through your work, to make a portion of them passionate advocates for change themselves - if they make changes in their own life, that can scale up to many many millions, but also you can encourage them to act as empowered citizens to lobby for change themselves, whether it’s at the level of corporations or governments.

It’s using the best of culture and arts to engage people in what is - I’m not a doom merchant, but it is an existential issue. Will we have the society we do now, in twenty or thirty years time, if we don’t take action?

In my last job at the Horniman, which has a big family audience with young kids, it’s really motivating for parents, grandparents or carers to think about little kids - in twenty years’ time, thirty years’ time, when they’re adults, what sort of society will they be growing up in? That’s really powerful - that individual connection, spurred by the emotional attachment to cultural products and creativity, can be a real motivator.

GCC: What else do you think the sector needs to address?

In museums, we also want to highlight biodiversity. There is a structural problem in that there’s a separate climate COP and a separate biodiversity COP, which tends to show that they get talked about in separate arenas. A lot of attention has been placed on climate - which is understandable - and they clearly overlap, but biodiversity loss [is also important].

What those many museums who have outside spaces can do is also really important. That sometimes gets overshadowed by climate - we should bear in mind climate and biodiversity and the interactions between them.