Comment | Art world attitudes towards the climate emergency are changing, but the time to secure a viable future is now

It has been three years since I published my first Green is the New Black column in May 2022. Then as now, the intention is to cast a beady eye on the ways in which all facets of the art world—artists, institutions, organisations great and small—are responding to the environmental and climate crisis. On discovering that this third anniversary coincides with the May publication of Climate Action in the Art World: Towards a Greener Future, a new book covering the same subject by New York based writer Annabel Keenan, it seemed an opportune moment to take stock of some of the key measures achieved within our sector to date, the better to understand all that still needs to be done.

A major success story has been the growth of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), the international charity which was recently described by Frieze magazine as “the Green Conscience of the Art World”. In less than five years GCC has swelled from a small founder group of concerned London-based galleries and writers—including this one—to a global network of more than 1800 institutions, galleries, artists and art workers from more than sixty countries worldwide, with Tate Modern director emerita Frances Morris recently appointed as its chair.

This expanding community, nearly half of which now consists of artists, public institutions and non-profits, remains committed to the core GCC mission, which is to reduce the visual art sector’s CO2 emissions by at least 50% by 2030, and to promote near zero waste practices. In order to facilitate this, GCC continues to expand its extensive, research-based tools and resources—most notably its comprehensive toolkits tailored for both artists and art fairs and its recently updated Carbon Calculator—all of which are free and have now become the sector’s first stop for information and carbon-crunching.

GCC has also played a crucial role in advocating for important shifts in industry practice and brokering environmentally responsible partnerships. Its Sustainable Shipping Campaign, launched in 2022, worked with all aspects of the supply chain, including insurers, to set new standards in sustainable artwork transportation, most notably to make land and sea a viable alternative to carbon-hungry air freight. A particular achievement was last year’s groundbreaking Art Fair Alliance, in which more than 40 fairs worldwide—including the big beasts Art Basel, Arco, Frieze and Tefaf—put commercial competitiveness aside in a unified pledge to cut their emissions in half by 2030 and to slash their waste. They also all agreed to use the GCC’s comprehensive Art Fair Toolkit, which leaves no aspect of art fair activity unscrutinised, from containers to carpeting.

The final challenge is now for this consortium to eschew its allegiance to private jets, still shockingly beloved by so many ostensibly climate conscious art world players. This also applies to most of the world’s leading global commercial galleries, many of which are now conspicuously espousing environmental causes and integrating sustainability into their operations, while at the same time their owners refuse to relinquish this most polluting form of transport.

Partners on Art and Climate Targets

A collegial spirit is essential for any meaningful, systemic change to take place and a great example has been set by the existence of Partners on Art and Climate Targets (PACT), an international coalition of organisations from across America and Europe devoted to climate and environmental action first established in 2021. This six-strong lineup consists of GCC, together with Art into Acres, Art + Climate Action, Art Switch, Galleries Commit and Artists Commitand Ki Culture. Although each of these bodies draws on multiple pathways for engaging in a range of climate and environmental actions, collectively they have also increased their effectiveness by centring their activities around four main pillars: reducing emissions, transitioning to zero waste, creating unified standards and—crucially—adopting intersectional environmentalism to incorporate social justice.

Through their individual endeavours, as well as by pooling the resources and the expertise of their membership, in recent years PACT has made significant and wide-ranging contributions to climate and environmental activism. These include the vast tracts of land now permanently conserved across the world by the California based Art into Acres; the multiple online information-pooling conferences hosted by the New York and Amsterdam non-profit Art Switch; and the Climate Action Database, developed by the New York based, worker led collective Galleries Commit.

This growing database contains information on actions taken, plans published and resources to support climate action in the art sector, and is also hosted on the websites of the San Francisco Bay Area Collective Art + Climate Action, as well as the artist-led Artists Commit. This latter group has expanded from a collective of New York artists formed in partnership with Galleries Commit and now encompasses more than 300 signatories from across the world, all of whom are encouraged to advocate for sustainability and climate actions. Most notably this includes creating specially developed Climate Impact Reports to accompany their activities.

Institutional efforts

Institutions are also increasingly joining forces to be more effective, both locally and globally. In the UK Tate was an early environmental trailblazer, and the past few years have seen other major institutions such as Guggenheim Bilbao, MOCA Los Angeles and the MORI Museum in Tokyo begin monitoring their carbon emissions and appointing designated members of staff to put sustainable practices at the centre of their programming and operations.

A plethora of international institutions including Tate have also gathered behind the Bizot Green Protocol guidelines. These research based guiding principles, relating to climate control, transport and long term collection care, were first published a decade ago by the prestigious Bizot Group of 53 international Museum directors.

In 2023 the Bizot Group updated these protocols and made a resolution to roll out “a greener option first” principle across all areas of museum practice. This ”green first” principle has now been adopted by other museum organisations such as Britain’s National Museums Director’s Council (NMDC), as well as the 200 strong Association of American Museum Directors (AAMD), the Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) and the Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO).

Artist-led change

Then of course, there are the artists. As I have repeatedly chronicled, in matters environmental artists have long been front and centre in getting the rest of the sector and the world at large to take notice. Whether it is Ackroyd and Harvey planting groves of oaks from acorns harvested from the trees planted by Joseph Beuys, Imani Jacqueline Brown mapping centuries of extractivism in the Mississippi River Delta, or Yinka Shonibare’s grapplings with the environmental legacies of colonialism, in recent years there has been an upsurge in remarkable work that inspires, disturbs, shift perceptions, raises awareness and frequently makes a practical difference. And this shows no sign of stopping, with more and more artists worldwide incorporating climate action into their work and their operations in ways as wide and varied as the human imagination.

Many of the significant, sector-wide measures I have just outlined also feature in Climate Action in the Art World: Towards a Greener Future. The latest in Hot Topics in the Art World, a series of slim, punchy, issue-based titles published by Lund Humphries and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, the book offers a useful and timely snapshot of the multifarious ways in which the art world—mainly in London, New York and Los Angeles—is currently grappling with and adapting to the complex, ever-changing situation that faces us all.

Both Keenan’s book and my columns are in accord that while much has recently been achieved in changing art world attitudes towards the climate and ecological emergency, now is the time to step up the action. And fast. Against a backdrop of ever more extreme weather events and with an aggressive climate sceptic now back in the White House, all these important pledges, commitments, manifestoes, projects and agreements urgently need to be implemented, enforced and placed front and centre. Time is running out for the art world to meet its climate targets and for the prospect of a viable future, green or otherwise.