Climate adaptation and resilience in the visual arts, part one

There’s an important conversation that the art world needs to have right now: how are we preparing for the climate impacts that we can’t avoid? What changes do we need to make to our buildings, our practices and our business models in order to survive (and thrive) in a hotter, stormier, riskier world?

Even if we succeed in cutting our emissions and avoiding the worst-case scenarios, a significant amount of climate impact is now unavoidable and is already being felt across the art world. While some arts organisations have already started to actively engage with this topic (see the examples below), others have yet to fully integrate it into their plans, policies and practices.

Here at GCC, we want to encourage our members to think seriously about climate adaptation and resilience. What adaptations and preparations do you need to make yourself? What role can you play in local community adaptation plans? And how can you ensure that these measures go hand-in-hand with your carbon reduction strategy?

Context: the new normal

The climate crisis is already here. Floods, droughts, storms, heatwaves and wildfires are happening more often and are more severe, and day-to-day conditions around the world are also shifting. This manifests in different ways at different times and places – certain locations and seasons are becoming hotter, wetter, drier, more humid, or even sometimes colder.

There is also a significant amount of future global heating “locked in” by the greenhouse gases we have already emitted. Exactly how much will depend on how rapidly we can reduce global emissions over the next few years, but a certain amount of extra warming is unavoidable at this stage.

While climate impacts still disproportionately affect the most vulnerable communities in the Global South, the consequences of global heating are now escalating across the planet, from major wildfires in California and Australia to serious floods and heatwaves across Europe.

Buildings, equipment, systems and practices that developed during the more stable climate of the 20th and early 21st Century were in many cases not designed to cope with this new reality. If arts organisations wish to survive and thrive in a climate-changed world, we need to take this issue seriously.

Adaptation and Resilience: some definitions

“Climate adaptation” refers to measures taken by an organisation to adapt to the new realities of a changed - and changing - global climate. These can include physical changes to buildings or equipment as well as changes in policies, practices and business models.

“Climate resilience” refers to an organisation’s ability to cope with the impacts of the unfolding climate crisis, including the ability to recover after a severe climate event.

One way to think about this is that climate resilience is your goal, and climate adaptation measures are the steps you take to get there.

What’s already happening in the art world?

In March 2026, an event called 'Climate Resilience in the Cultural Sector’ brought together arts and culture representatives at the British Library in London. A series of experts and practitioners from the culture sector laid out the case that:

• Climate impacts are now locked in for decades
• Institutions must prepare for worsening conditions
• The cultural sector is far behind where it needs to be

Some organisations are already moving ahead on this. The British Library itself has worked with the engineering and design firm Arup to develop a risk reduction and adaptation plan that has reduced their emissions while also identifying 35 adaptation measures along with institutional response plans.

The conference also heard how even well-prepared organisations can face unexpected cascading threats. Alex Rock from the Museum of Making in Derby told the conference how flooding from Storm Babet in 2023 was worse than predicted, with water overflowing the incomplete local flood defences and being accidentally redirected towards the museum. They now store sandbags onsite, have reassessed their flooding risks and produced a revised plan that expects worse-case scenarios and “over-prepares”.

If you have your own examples or case studies to share, either of good practice or negative climate impacts that the wider art world should be aware of, please do let us know.

Adaptation and resilience: where to start?

The first step is to raise the issue within your organisation and start the conversation. Do you have a risk register for your organisation, and if so does it include an up-to-date assessment of environmental risks? What information already exists about climate-related impacts and risks that could affect your operations, not just in your buildings but more broadly with regard to travel, offsite events and supply chains? Are there local climate resilience initiatives that you could join up with?

The climate crisis is already changing the art world, whether we like it or not. But we still can still reduce the worst impacts by taking a lead on carbon reduction and climate action; and we can strengthen our defences against the unavoidable impacts, by shifting to more resilient practices and operations.

If we do this with care and positivity, then this could be an opportunity to refresh the climate conversation and move forward with actions that will help tackle the wider crisis while making our organisations more robust and ready to deal with all kinds of future challenges, not just the climate emergency. But we do need to act now.

We’ll explore some of these questions in more detail in the next blog in this series, along with further examples of climate risks across the art world and links to useful resources, so watch this space.