19 THE THREE KEY QUESTIONS Andrew Potts Coordinator, Climate Heritage Network Secretariat It is with great pleasure that I recommend to you these proceedings of the debate held on January 17, 2022, on key topics on culture/cultural heritage and climate change. Frankly, I am delighted by the simple fact that cutting edge climate change questions (three in fact!) were debated at all in a cultural policy context, and even more delighted by the calibre and richness of that debate. Writing, as I am, in 2022, I see no need to repeat yet again the dire warnings about the unfolding climate crisis. For years, 350 parts per million (ppm) had been judged the upper safe limited of global warming-causing Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. When concentrations reached 415 ppm in 2020, it prompted the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to declare a climate emergency. And now concentrations are above 420, pushing the atmosphere further into territory not seen for millions of years. We risk this decade overshooting the Paris Agreement’s goal of holding global warming to below 1.5°C, with irreversible adverse impacts,1 including those to culture and heritage. A warning I would like to repeat, however, regards the persistent failure of culture and heritage leaders and institutions to adequately take on board this unfolding climate crisis. It was in 2018 that the world’s leading climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), concluded that avoiding the worst impacts of climate change by limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid and farreaching transitions in the way we use land, buildings, cities and more. The next year, Professor Toshiyuki Kono, President of ICOMOS, wrote: It would be foolish to imagine the practice of heritage remaining static while the world goes through the rapid and far-reaching transitions discussed in the IPCC’s recent Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C.2 And yet, business as usual persists with many cultural institutions, ministries, public bodies, and NGOs. There are impressive counterexamples, but too often these exceptions prove the rule. One consequence of this failure is the under-developed nature of the climate discourse within many cultural policy and practice arenas. Climate science is constantly evolving. Urgent debates rage about
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