Cultural Adaptations

Cultural Adaptations and partners logos

Cultural Adaptations was a Creative Europe project, led by Creative Carbon Scotland with partners in three EU countries, on culture's role in society's adaptation to climate, and the adaptation issues that cultural organisations need to think about.

The project

Cultural Adaptations was a co-operation project funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme, running from October 2018 to March 2021, and led by Creative Carbon Scotland. The project focused on culture’s role in society’s adaptation to climate change, and the adaptation issues that cultural organisations themselves need to think about.

Go to www.culturaladaptations.com

The partners

Four cultural organisations explored collaboratively how this approach can work in countries with similar climate challenges but differing socio-political frameworks. Each cultural partner worked with a local adaptation partner:

Project activities

Over the 30-month project, a number of activities took place to explore different aspects of the project:

  • Each pairing of cultural and adaptation partner developed a methodology for managers of local cultural SMEs to enable them to develop and implement climate change adaptation strategies.
  • To test how artists can help provide new ways of thinking, fresh perspectives and different approaches to the challenges of adapting to climate change, each pairing placed an artist in an adaptation project as an embedded artist.

Each pairing organised a meeting attended by all the partners, who participated in a workshop to disseminate the methodology to local cultural managers and a review of the embedded artist project. NB: due to the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 some of these meeting had to be realised online.

In addition, several overarching activities took place, based in Scotland but focused internationally:

  • Two evaluators, one from a cultural and one from a sociology background, also attended these transnational meetings to help assess and gather the learning from the activities.
  • An international conference was due to be held in Scotland in October 2020 to bring together and disseminate the cumulative project learning. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic this has been transferred to a four-day virtual conference, which took place from 2nd to 5th March 2021.
  • Creative Carbon Scotland produced two toolkits and supporting digital resource to enable cultural and adaptation actors across Europe and further afield to develop their own adaptation strategies and benefit wider society by running embedded artist projects.

Cultural Adaptations attracted strong evidence of demand for its outputs, with the Scottish Government’s Climate Change division committing significant funding to support the conference, the four local adaptation partners committing their staff time over 30 months and the ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability) network committing to attending all the transnational meetings and the conference to help with communicating the project outputs to a world-wide audience.

Find out more on the Cultural Adaptations website


Cultural Adaptations (EUCAN) was co-funded with the support of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and the Scottish Government.

Creativity to help Glasgow City Region respond to Climate CrisisCultural Adaptations

About Creative Carbon Scotland

We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

[email protected]

+44 (0)131 243 2760

Supported by

Creative Scotland logo City of Edinburgh Council logo

A project initiated by Edinburgh’s Festivals with key partners the Federation of Scottish Theatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network

Edinburgh Festival City logo Federation of Scottish Theatre logo Scottish Contemporary Art Network logo

Accreditations

Scottish Living Wage Accreditation