Museums and Climate: Why Cultural Institutions Belong in the Conversation

From exhibitions that turn industrial heritage into hope to galleries built for climate grief, museums are finding their voice on the defining issue of our time. Here is why they belong at the centre of the conversation.

Climate change is often discussed in the language of data: parts per million, degrees of warming, emissions targets. The numbers matter, but they rarely move people. What moves people is story, place, emotion and community, and those are exactly the things museums do best.

Museums also hold a rare position of public trust. They are places where people of every age and background come to make sense of the world, and they can host difficult conversations without the heat of a political debate. That makes them uniquely placed to help the public understand the climate crisis, cope with how it makes them feel, and believe they can do something about it.

And museums are not just commentators. Their buildings, exhibitions and supply chains carry a real environmental footprint, which gives them the chance to lead by example. Here are four ways museums around the world are proving that cultural institutions belong in the climate conversation.

1. Museums Turn an Abstract Crisis Into Stories People Can Feel

Museums can make a global problem local, physical and personal. Sometimes that means taking an honest look at their own collections.

At Discovery Museum in Newcastle, staff had long celebrated the North East’s industrial breakthroughs: the lightbulb, the steam turbine, Armstrong’s pioneering hydroelectric work. Assistant Keeper Daniel Stoker admits there was always some discomfort in celebrating inventions that helped cause the climate crisis.

Rather than disown the collection, the 2024 exhibition Steam to Green recast it, arguing that the same inventive spirit that drove the industrial revolution now powers the region’s energy transition. More than 18 local green technology companies took part, and hands-on interactives let families try a wind simulator and power solar aeroplanes.

Crucially, the team chose hope over alarm. Their partners at Newcastle University’s Centre for Energy encouraged them to lean even further into optimism, because people who feel hopeful about the future are more likely to act (see Discovery Museum’s Steam to Green exhibition).

At the Royal Ontario Museum, Curator of Climate Change Soren Brothers goes a step further. He suggests museums sometimes shouldn’t talk about climate change directly at all, and instead focus on shared values such as cleaner air, safer streets and flood-resilient neighbourhoods. His examples are local: Toronto’s Port Lands flood protection project and Ontario’s coal phase-out, which won public support largely because of its health benefits. Collections can carry the story too, such as sediment cores from Crawford Lake, the site proposed as the marker for the Anthropocene.

The lesson for museums: lead with local stories and shared values, pair honesty with hope, and don’t be afraid to re-examine the objects you have always celebrated.

2. Museums Make Space for How Climate Change Makes Us Feel

Climate change is not only a scientific problem. It is an emotional one, and that emotional weight falls hardest on young people. A 2023 national survey found that 80% of young Canadians aged 16 to 25 believe climate change affects their mental health.

Montréal’s Biosphère responded with Emolab, which opened in November 2025 as Canada’s first exhibition devoted entirely to the science of climate emotions (City of Montréal). Designed for teenagers and young adults, it draws on psychology, neuroscience and the social sciences to help visitors name what they feel, from sadness and anger to helplessness and hope. It then helps them understand what holds people back from acting, and leaves them with practical tools for building resilience together.

That approach matches what other museums are finding. At the Royal Ontario Museum, Soren Brothers warns that eco-anxiety can make some visitors avoid the subject entirely. Discovery Museum deliberately avoided feeding climate anxiety in an exhibition built for families and children.

The lesson for museums: acknowledging feelings is not a distraction from climate action. For many visitors, it is the first step towards it.

3. Museums Can Lead by Example

A museum that talks about climate change earns credibility by cutting its own footprint. The most effective institutions treat sustainability as everyone’s job, not a single department’s.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has worked on this for more than two decades. It now runs on 40% of the electricity it used when it opened, and around half of its original gas consumption. In 2021 it formalised GU-Zero, a working group that brings together teams from maintenance, curatorial, design, finance, events, retail and more.

Curators now bring exhibition ideas to the group early and get back real data on their environmental impact. The design team reuses platforms, builds fewer new walls, and is exploring sea freight as a lower-carbon alternative to air freight for exhibition loans. The museum’s stated goal is climate neutrality by 2030, although it admits that replacing natural gas for heating is a problem it has not yet solved.

The Canadian Museum of History was built with sustainability in mind in the 1980s, using water from the Ottawa River to cool the building. When Canada’s net-zero legislation required federal institutions to report their emissions, the museum chose to make every team responsible for sustainability in its own work, coordinated by a group reporting to senior leadership. It published its first annual environmental report in October 2025, measuring everything from building energy to staff commuting. CEO Caroline Dromaguet describes a museum as a steward of both heritage and the environment.

The lesson for museums: measure your footprint, share responsibility across every team, and be honest about the problems you haven’t solved yet.

4. Museums Turn Concern Into Collective Action

Many people care about climate change but feel they have no way to act. Museums can close that gap by giving people, especially young people, a genuine voice.

At Mark | Museum for a New Danish History, curator Anna Louise Siggaard noticed that the local climate action plan sat in a PDF few people read. The museum responded with Climate Roots, a travelling cardboard tree to which residents add handwritten hopes, drawings and prototypes, many created in workshops with more than 200 young people. In another exhibition, Your Past, Our Future, teenagers wrote their own blunt protest placards and insisted on speaking at the opening. Handing over control, the museum found, increased its influence.

Mark Museum is also honest about what didn’t work. A sensory walk about local water pollution left some students anxious afterwards. The museum now builds reflection time into every climate programme, so strong feelings can turn into action rather than distress.

The Reykjavík Art Museum revived a 1990s partnership with the city’s summer youth work scheme to bring 600 teenagers into its climate-themed exhibition, Elements. Sofas, beanbags, informal educators and a trusting tone helped them feel welcome rather than watched. Even the making had sustainability built in: participants created videos, performances and happenings instead of physical objects, and their work was shown at Reykjavík Culture Night. As education manager Ariana Katrín Katrínardóttir puts it, green museums are not only efficient but generous (learn more about Reykjavík’s youth climate programme).

The lesson for museums: give people real ownership, make taking part easy and rewarding, and always leave time to turn emotion into action.

Why Cultural Institutions Belong in the Conversation

Museums will not solve the climate crisis on their own, and the best of them say so openly. As Discovery Museum’s Daniel Stoker puts it, museum professionals don’t have all the answers. What they can do is choose something achievable, such as helping people rethink their behaviour and feel more hopeful, and start there.

The examples here address different parts of the climate challenge. Discovery Museum and Reykjavík describe ways of inviting people into the conversation; Bilbao and the Canadian Museum of History explain how environmental responsibility enters institutional decisions. They offer starting points for programme and operational planning, although participation figures and practitioner reflections do not tell us whether visitors changed their behaviour afterwards.

Want to go further? Explore more case studies in our Sustainability section and hear from these practitioners and others at the Green Museums Summit.