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Climate Outreach joins mobilisation to unite Cultural Heritage for Climate Action

By Léane de Laigue on September 7, 2018

Whale skeleton, Natural History Museum, South Kensington/London

The urgent need for increased ambition by the cultural heritage sector on climate change is uniting culture, heritage, indigenous, sustainability and community organizations from around the world at the Cultural Heritage Mobilization in San Francisco USA, on 12-13 September.

Climate Outreach is proud to be supporting this effort as an Endorsing Organization. The Mobilization event is an official affiliated event of the Global Climate Action Summit organized under the auspices of the California Office of Historic Preservation.

The Mobilization complements our work in collaboration with a number of UK based organisations in the heritage sector. This includes a workshop facilitation pack and webinar to help the heritage sector communicate climate change in an effective way.

Running from September 12–14, 2018, the Global Climate Action Summit will bring leaders and people together from around the world to San Francisco to showcase climate action and inspire deeper commitments in support of the Paris Agreement.

The Summit will feature heads of state, mayors and regional leaders from around the world as well as companies, investors and citizens. The Mobilization is the first cultural heritage event of its kind to be organized at a major international climate change summit.

The Mobilization program will showcase key ways that cultural heritage — tangible and intangible — can help communities achieve their climate targets. This includes heritage-based carbon mitigation strategies like promoting the reuse of existing buildings and the sensitive retrofitting of older and historic buildings for energy efficiency.

It will also underscore the important role heritage plays in enhancing adaptive capacity and reducing the vulnerability of communities, from building social cohesion to guiding resilience planning. The role of culture and heritage as a vector for climate communication, justice, science and research will also be explored.

The Mobilization will support the launch of California’s new Cultural Resources Climate Change Task Force. It will also witness the launch of a new international Climate Heritage Network, a mutual support network of city, state/provincial, regional and tribal historic preservation offices (together with related NGOs, universities and other organizations) committed to aid their jurisdictions in tackling climate change and achieving the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. The Network is expected to create an effective platform for advancing the Climate Change and Cultural Heritage agenda in international climate policy processes.

The Mobilization is being hosted by the California Historical Society and will be livestreamed through a collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and live tweeted by @ClimateHeritage. More information is available at www.climateheritage.org.

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By Léane de Laigue (Maternity leave)

Léane leads on disseminating our insights and resources in a way that creates the biggest impact possible. She started her career as a Marketing Manager for Johnson & Johnson, before deciding to become a history teacher. She was asked to teach an Environmental Studies class without any previous experience in the subject, and learning and talking about climate change with her students completely changed her worldview. She has since dedicated herself to public engagement with climate change, working for the David Suzuki Foundation and now Climate Outreach.

Léane’s life has been evenly split between Canada, France, the UK and the US, with a bit of time in Hong Kong and Argentina. She is a native speaker of English and French, speaks Spanish and is currently learning Mandarin. She holds a Master’s degree in Environment and Management (Canada) and an MBA in Marketing (US) as well as undergraduate degrees in Education (Canada) and Humanities (France). In her spare time she can be found climbing mountains, kayaking, reading graphic novels and sometimes unicycling.

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