Over the last century, humanity has benefited from remarkable improvements in health and in quality of life. Yet at the same time, we have been exploiting the Earth’s resources in unprecedented and unsustainable ways. Our world is now changing rapidly under the influence of human behaviour: climate change and biodiversity loss but also pandemics are just some of the most dramatic manifestations. These changes threaten the security of critical ecosystems and jeopardise the gains made over the past century in human health and well-being. As trusted sources of information and sites of transformative engagement, museums can and must play a role in addressing these issues. How should museums reinvent themselves in the face of a planetary emergency? How should we prepare ourselves for increasingly frequent extreme weather events and social unrest? What is the role of our collections and how can they be protected, in the face of global changes and also local disasters? What new roles could our institutions, and ICOM itself, play in the age of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion?
The conference consists of invited keynote lectures by environmental scientists, social investigators, cultural practitioners and political activists, and case studies from the point of view of museum individuals, associations and authorities that examine possible future scenarios and inform a concluding panel discussion.
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