1.3 HORIZONTAL PRIORITIES

CONTRIBUTING TO THE EU GREEN DEAL

Sustainability has become an integral part of EU cultural policy. One of the guiding principles of the Work Plan for Culture is that culture contributes to sustainable social and economic development. In line with the New European Agenda for Culture and the Council Work Plan for Culture 2019-2022, work continued with the Member States and stakeholders to foster the sector’s adaptation to climate change and to promote the cultural dimension of sustainable development.

In 2020, Commissioner Gabriel launched a social media campaign ‘This summer, I visit Europe’, inviting people to re-discover Europe’s treasures, be they natural or cultural, and to enjoy again visits to museums and heritage sites in their surroundings. The objective was the promotion of local, sustainable cultural tourism as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign featured sites, events and initiatives in the EU-27. It had more than 18 million impressions and close to 16 thousand interactions/engagements.

In parallel, creative and cultural stakeholders are increasingly aware of the role they can play in raising awareness on sustainability issues. Creative Europe’s contribution to fighting climate change was recognised by a 2020 indepth analysis by the European Parliament. The study found that “There is a significant (increasing) share of projects that are already addressing environmental issues.”

The sector’s increasing concern for climate change and environmental sustainability shows clearly in projects supported under the different Culture Sub-programme calls for proposals. Funded projects foster the exchange of practices, ideas and solutions for decreasing the environmental impact of cultural activities. Be it in the performing arts, live events, architecture or in the music or graphic domains, cultural organisations are actively revisiting their working practices to adopt more environment-friendly solutions. Chapter 5 presents the most inspiring projects recently funded by the Culture sub-programme New European Bauhaus

The New European Bauhaus (NEB) initiative was launched in September 2020 by European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, to bring the European Green Deal to life in an attractive, innovative and human-centric way. The NEB wants form to follow planet, creating an interdisciplinary design movement and a think-do tank integrating three dimensions: sustainability (including circularity), quality of experience (including aesthetics) and inclusion (including affordability), and showing that creativity is in finding affordable, inclusive and attractive solutions to our climate challenges.

Bringing citizens, artists, designers and architects together with engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs, the cultural and creative sectors, and in particular Creative Europe beneficiaries, have a key role to play by sharing existing knowledge and good practice but also new ideas which the NEB could build on, consolidate and scale up together with inputs from other fields.

Greening in the Audiovisual Sector

As a result of 2019 initial meetings and data collection on the challenges and possibilities of eco-friendly strategies in the audiovisual sector, the first European Film Forum of 2020, on 24 February, during the Berlinale Film Festival, was dedicated to sustainability in audiovisual.

Roundtable during Berlinale 2020