Beyond Sustainability: How IMMA Is Learning to Think Like a Living System

What if the goal wasn’t to reduce a museum’s impact, but to actively improve the conditions for life? At the Irish Museum of Modern Art, a new framework called REGEN is asking that question — and beginning to answer it.

For many cultural institutions, sustainability means one thing: doing less harm. Fewer emissions, less waste, more responsible procurement. The logic is one of reduction, and it matters. But Lisa Fitzsimmons, Strategy and Sustainability Lead at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), has been asking whether reduction is enough — and whether the museums sector might be ready for something more ambitious.

The framework she has developed in response, REGEN IMMA, starts not with targets but with a shift in how the museum understands itself. “What happens,” she asked in her presentation at MuseumNext, “when you stop thinking about a museum as a building with a carbon footprint and start thinking about it as something more alive — a living organism within a wider ecosystem?”

The Limits of Reduction

Fitzsimmons is careful not to dismiss conventional sustainability work. IMMA has been measuring and reducing its energy use, waste and procurement impact for years, and remains committed to significant government-set targets: a 51% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and a 50% improvement in energy efficiency by the same year. These are, she emphasised, “very stretching, important targets that we’re absolutely committed to achieving.”

But she has also come to see sustainability’s logic of reduction as incomplete. “After a while,” she said, “it starts to feel a little bit exhausting.” Regeneration asks a different question — not only how to do less harm, but how to repair, renew and restore. Where sustainability is built on scarcity, regeneration works, as Fitzsimmons put it, with “a logic of abundance.”
The distinction is meaningful for museums in particular. Unlike a logistics company or a data centre, a museum is already a living system — made up of people, materials, stories, communities, emotions and relationships, all circulating and shaping one another. Managing it as one, she argues, is not a metaphor but a practical possibility.

The REGEN Framework

REGEN IMMA is built around six regenerative principles. Integrated systems thinking positions the museum as one interconnected organism rather than a set of separate departments. Place-centred practice roots decisions in the ecology, history and community context of where the museum is — in IMMA’s case, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a 48-acre site close to Dublin city centre with deep layers of memory and public life embedded in its grounds. Co-creation with community treats the people around the museum not as audiences but as collaborators. Regenerative capacity designs for net positive outcomes wherever possible. Circular metabolism turns waste into resource and endings into beginnings. And indigenous and local knowledge draws on the wisdom already embedded in place.

Importantly, these principles are not confined to operations. They are just as relevant to programming, culture change and curatorial decision-making as they are to procurement or facilities management.

Three Expressions of Regenerative Practice

Fitzsimmons described three projects that bring these ideas to life at IMMA.

The first is Earth Rising, the museum’s festival of eco-art and activism, which she describes as a living lab. It brings together artists, scientists, activists, policymakers and community groups to co-create experiences that connect ecological care with creative joy. The framing is deliberate: in an era of growing climate fatigue, Earth Rising is IMMA’s attempt to make planetary care feel desirable rather than dutiful — human and emotionally honest rather than didactic. “It gives people permission to feel things, to connect, to imagine, and to move from being spectators to being participants,” Fitzsimmons said.

The second is circular exhibition production — what she describes as the place where values meet reality. IMMA’s draft sustainability policy commits to integrating sustainability into how exhibitions are planned, produced and dismantled from the very start: prioritising low-impact materials, reusing wherever possible and supporting artists and producers to work more sustainably. The practical challenge is significant — it changes budgets, timelines and supplier conversations — but the constraint has also driven genuine innovation. A current example is a flat-pack plinth system developed by the museum’s technical team, designed to offer curators a wide variety of sizes and configurations while dramatically reducing material use and solving a long-standing storage problem. The same components bolt together in different configurations, can be stored flat against a wall when not in use, and are cut from sheet material to minimise waste. “Rather than thinking about circularity as something that’s hindering our ambition,” Fitzsimmons said, “we’re actually finding that it’s fostering greater innovation.”

The third is community engagement, understood not as bringing people in but as becoming more reciprocal, more porous and more accountable to the people who share the same ecosystem as the museum. Co-creation, she acknowledged, can be slower and messier than conventional programming, but it builds the kinds of long-term relationships that make an institution matter — and resilient.

Measuring Signs of Life

One of the most distinctive aspects of the REGEN framework is its approach to measurement. Alongside mandatory carbon and energy reporting, IMMA is developing a set of what Fitzsimmons calls Living Metrics: indicators designed to show that the museum is thriving, not just performing.

These include staff wellbeing and learning, the percentage of resources reused and recycled in exhibition production, species of birds and flora observed on the museum’s site, and audience connection and repeat visits. “These are not just corporate KPIs,” she said. “These are signs of life.”

The distinction points to something important about the regenerative approach. If the goal is renewal — of community, creativity and the natural world — then the measurements need to reflect whether renewal is actually happening, not just whether emissions are falling.
An Invitation

Fitzsimmons closed with a direct invitation to others working in sustainability: don’t stop at doing less harm. Try one regenerative shift this year. Start with place, with circularity, with co-creation, or with Living Metrics. “Regeneration is not a destination,” she said. “It’s a practice.”

Her argument, ultimately, is that museums are unusually well placed to lead this shift — not because they have the best data or the most ambitious targets, but because they already deal in meaning, emotion, imagination and creativity. At a time when the scale of the climate crisis can feel paralysing, that capacity to help people feel, connect and imagine is itself a form of leadership.

Lisa Fitzsimmons is Strategy and Sustainability Lead at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin. She presented this work at the Green Museums Summit 2026.