Press Release 4: Arts in climate policy

Drawing on its work with communities in Sweden, Greece and Croatia, WATERFRONTS has set out a series of policy recommendations urging decision-makers at European, national, regional and local level to embed participatory, arts-based methods into climate adaptation, coastal management and environmental education.

The recommendations were developed collaboratively by the project’s three partners, coordinated by GOTALAND (Sweden) and informed by associated partners, drawing on the project’s community work and on a dedicated reflection session with participants.

The project argues that participatory arts should be recognised both as a way to engage communities and as a form of applied environmental research, one that can make climate policy more inclusive and better grounded in people’s lived experience. Its main recommendations include:

Key recommendations

• Embed participatory, arts-based methods into coastal management plans, climate adaptation strategies and environmental education curricula.

• Use multi-sensory and youth-led creative methods to broaden participation in environmental dialogue, reaching groups often underrepresented in decision-making, including rural residents, migrants, people with disabilities and low-income communities.

• Resource-structured, ongoing collaboration between artists, communities, scientists and policymakers, in line with the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus.

•  Treat advocacy outputs, such as exhibitions, site-specific installations, community publications and digital storytelling, as communication tools that translate complex climate data into relatable, human-centred experiences.

The recommendations connect to the wider goal of WATERFRONTS: to raise public awareness of climate change on Europe’s waterfronts and to support a shift towards environmental policy that is informed not only by science but also by the voices and creative capacities of the communities it aims to serve.

Media enquiries

For interviews and images, please contact the WATERFRONTS project team via https://www.waterfronts.site/contact. Images are available on request.