Climate crisis on display. Reimagining museums' climate communication
Short description
This project aims to contribute to strengthening museums’ communication about the climate crisis. Promoting climate literacy is a crucial component of efforts to address climate change. At present, however, climate communication is not leading to the societal transformations that are needed. It is therefore both necessary and urgent to develop new and more effective forms of communication.
Research team
- Staffan Lundén, University of Gothenburg
- Anna Samuelsson, University of Gothenburg
- Marzia Varutti, University of Gothenburg
Background
Social institutions are central in building public perceptions of climate change; this is particularly true for museums – among the most visited and trusted social institutions. Reaching every year more than a billion visitors globally, 30 million in Sweden alone, museums have a vast, largely untapped potential to influence the public and promote positive change.
This is especially relevant for Gothenburg, given its ambition to be one of the 100 European cities to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. The City’s action plan stresses the importance of schools and universities as “knowledge arenas” with potential to influence social behavior (City of Gothenburg 2024, 17, 62), whilst museums are surprisingly absent. Yet the museums included in our study have a combined visitor number of around 1,5 million, which points to their potential to be key players in enhancing Gothenburg’s chances to reach its climate neutrality goals.
This project is a timely and critical opportunity to better understand what these institutions currently communicate to the public about the climate crisis, and to engage with the key question of how this communication can be developed to promote a more sustainable future, locally and globally.
The project is located at the intersection of environmental communication and museology. It aims to create new knowledge and practice that can enhance climate change communication in museums and through that, enhance their potential to affect positive societal transformation.
Research questions
The project asks the following research questions:
- How is the climate crisis communicated in museums? What are the main issues and challenges, and how to counter them? And conversely, what are the (untapped) potentials?
- What concrete solutions can be adopted to enhance climate change communication in museums?
In order to answer these questions, the applicants are developing a research project that entails:
- An in-depth investigation of exhibitions addressing climate change in major Swedish museums, to identify key issues and formulate preliminary suggestions to enhance museum environmental communication.
- Collaborative experimentation with museums through workshops with museum professionals to jointly devise solutions to the issues identified in the first phase.