Climate Change is one the biggest challenges for today’s society. For the eleven arts organisations making up the IMAGINE 2020 – Arts and Climate Change network, 2020 is a realistic date to work towards for making changes necessary to stabilise the climate and secure a sustainable future.

What role can the cultural sector play in the necessary transition process, to drastically reduce carbon emissions, to mitigate climate change, and increase resilience to the effects of peak oil? Artists traditionally confront issues of such societal importance head on and often act as a catalyst for societal change. Art, as Philip Pullman puts it, is about beauty, but sometimes it has to warn. Can it do both? And more?

These are questions for the IMAGINE 2020 network. Sharing a vision, commitment, and a sense of responsibility, its members want to harness the power of the imagination to bring about the changes required for the re-invention of society. They firmly believe that artists and the cultural sector can and should play an important role in the necessary cultural shift needed if we want to maintain hope for a human and beautiful future. Art can bring people together who would normally not meet. It can provide a physical and imaginary space where people can take a step back, away from the corporate, the commercial and the educational, to exchange and engage with each other. It can address and involve more targeted audiences, such as young people, in playful yet serious ways. And above all it can create a positive energy and momentum for change through a sense of common purpose and hope.

Through a series of joint and individual actions, IMAGINE 2020 will engage the European cultural sector in the transition process and use its creative potential to raise awareness, provoke and nurture change among the general public.

The network spreads across nine European countries and brings together eleven diverse, highly motivated and experienced cultural institutions. Six of the partners have been working as part of the 2020 Network Thin Ice over the last two years to pilot a series of actions and share the results among them. Over the next five years IMAGINE 2020 will build on the successes of the pilot phase to initiate new artistic projects, create new work, and increase diversity of audiences reached.  The network will develop an effective communications strategy and aim to recruit new partners in Europe or across the Mediterranean to broaden the geographical scope of the actions. It will research new ways of producing and presenting exciting artworks with minimal environmental impact, and share its learning in order to get the European cultural sector as a whole to include climate change concerns in their everyday working practice.