Museums Journal: the Climate Justice special issue
The Museums Association (MA) is committed to tackling the climate and ecological crisis and supporting all those in the sector on their journey to become more sustainable, ethical and socially engaged.
The launch of the MA’s Museums for Climate Justice campaign embodies this. This will help museums to be bold and brave in taking action. In delivering this campaign, we aim to align work to tackle the climate and ecological crisis with the MA’s ongoing anti-racism and decolonisation campaigning, showing how these issues intersect.
We have chosen to use the term climate justice to brand this special issue of the magazine because it speaks to the MA’s campaign and the idea that we can’t tackle the climate crisis without addressing human rights and social inequality.
The MA’s Museums for Climate Justice campaign will be supported by a whole range of activities, events and resources. This includes a Museum Essentials online learning course, which will be unveiled in November. The MA annual conference will be held in Edinburgh in the same month. Sustainability is one of the four themes for the event, along with anti-racism, decolonisation, and staff and community wellbeing.
The MA is taking a range of actions to get our own house in order, including how we print Museums Journal. We are looking at how we can produce the magazine in a more sustainable way – more news on this soon.
We have already changed the way we wrap the magazine for mailing and the way our paper is sourced, but there is more we can do.
We have tried to bring in new voices to the discussions in this issue of Museums Journal, although there are many inspiring people, ideas and initiatives that we did not have space for. But the fact that the whole of this magazine focuses on climate justice does not mean we won’t cover the subject in future. On the contrary: we want to hear your ideas, stories and plans so we can share them with the rest of the sector in future issues.
Going forward, we want to send a positive message that, while securing climate justice is a daunting task, the world will benefit hugely from sustained and genuine efforts to achieve it. Our museums have an amazing opportunity to spread the climate justice message through collections, buildings, partnerships, people and communities.
Let’s all rise to the challenge and work tirelessly to make real and lasting change.