In these strange times of confinement, a multitude of individual and collective reflections on past errors and new opportunities have come up. Some of them focussed on the connections between culture, sustainable development and COVID 19, providing a holistic vision and placing the emphasis on the interconnection of crises and of solutions.
We present you with a selection of the most important ones – in our opinion:
The world we’ve created. In the first days of the pandemic in Spain, the magazine “Campo de Relampagos” published this very accurate article, in which commissioner Blanca de la Torre exposes the reciprocities between climate change and the corona virus, and our responsibility in both crises.
Tomorrow it will be (El día después será) is an initiative that started during quarantine thanks to the alliance of various organizations: the ltd of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, IS Global, Iberdrola and REDS. Through seminars and online conversations, tomorrow it will be forms an important platform for the lessons that the current health crisis offers, and how these can accelerate the transformation towards the attainment of the Agenda 2030. On the occasion of the Day of the Book, they also organized an event around culture changing the narrative.
Making sure that culture is an integral part of the answer to the COVID 19 pandemic is the title of the statement made by the campaign CULTURE2030GOAL on the 20th of April. Around 10 organizations such as ICOMOS or culture 21 have already signed the declaration. It is an appeal to governments and people in charge of decisions, to include the cultural world as a fundamental actor in the construction of an SDG-based tomorrow.
Although the coronavirus wasn’t initially a protagonist, it was inevitably present in the seminar “Climate emergency and culture, organized by the Festival Sismógraf. In this seminar -which used to be in-person but has been restructured to an on-line format- different professionals analyse sustainable practices in the cultural sector.
Now we make tomorrow took place less than a month ago, though the organizers say it feels more like a century. This day of talks, performances, encounters and solutions on how the cultural sector can respond to the climate crisis was organized by Julie’s Bicycle, an international reference in culture and sustainability. All of the interventions are available here.
The newspaper ‘El País’ created a special edition titled “the future after the coronavirus”, which is good as a final thought. In this edition, experts and thinkers share their impressions on the world to come. Their opinions and visions on science, culture, tourism or food supply show, once more, that we need to have a global vision, and escape from a reality divided into airtight compartments.
