The Cultural Elephant in the Climate Room

If we don't change mindsets, we fail.

Alison Tickell, climate culture activist and founder of Julie's Bicycle, says:

As negotiators battle over the inclusion of a reference to the phase out of fossil fuels in the final COP30 decision text, there is another, closely related  battle going on: the inclusion of a reference to culture. It is extraordinary that the root cause of climate change - fossil fuels -is not headlined. It's the elephant in the room that trumpets our inability to speak the truth. It should be the headline consensus,all the rest detail. How can this be? It isn't only the power and politics of fossil fuel interests (shame on us), nor a failure to grasp the science, incompetent negotiators; it isn't even the economics, with renewable energy out-performing fossil fuels.

It comes down to culture. Culture has driven fossil fuel logics: if you want an easy life - heat, cooling, cars, containers, travel, connectivity – in short, happiness  - you need energy from fossil fuels. That story is at the heart of climate change, a breakdown of natural life systems, and intolerable systemic and historic inequity.

Global south communities, whilst holding on to cultural values and traditions most tightly, continue  to bear the brunt of climate injustices, yet have done the least. The Global Goal on Adaptation is the only UNFCCC policy area which recognises that solutions to climate include cultural rights, practices and knowledge as climate justice.

Culture is power. COP30 is a historic moment to challenge fossil fuel narratives, and lifestyles through culture, and offer alternatives that are already thriving.

If we don't change mindsets we fail; If we don't root climate action in communities and cultural practices which include memory, ancestry, traditions, rituals, we fail. Culture - creative industries, arts, cultural heritage and practices, indigenous knowledge, food, faith traditions - is the roadmap for change.

If the Global Mutirao doesn’t take this on perhaps the G20 will, if Lula uses that forum as to reinstate a fossil-fuel phase out plan – down but not out.

Because culture is the instrument of our failure; now it must be the instrument of our success.