Nick Merriman, chief executive at English Heritage and Sarah Sutton, CEO at Environment and Culture Partners will speak at greenloop – sustainability in visitor attractions conference 2024.
Merriman’s excellent new book Museums and the Climate Crisis, for which Sutton contributed a chapter, will provide the basis for the session.
As some of society’s most trusted organisations, how can museums that are not looking at their own sustainability claim the authority to inform and inspire their visitors on climate change? Is it actually a neutral position not to take a stand on the climate emergency?
We will be discussing why the museum sector has been slow to act on the climate crisis, and how our cultural institutions can accelerate action and authentically amplify their influence.
Learning from across the sector
Merriman and Sutton call on museums to look to their peers to learn lessons.
At greenloop, museum professionals will be able to go one step further and learn from the whole visitor attractions sector and beyond!
Find out about Disney‘s holistic approach to sustainable design, or the work Therme Group is doing with the University of Surrey to create a blockchain carbon offsetting system.
Or are you just wondering what 2023’s extreme weather means for the future? We have Prof Peter Cox from the University of Exeter to answer all your climate questions.
Join us on April 30 online to find out more.
Nick MerrimanGiven such an existential threat, as institutions of the long term, able to place what’s going on in a wider context, it is an ethical imperative for museums to shout louder and take action.
English Heritage and Environment & Culture Partners
Dr Nick Merriman OBE joined English Heritage as Chief Executive in 2024. He studied archaeology at Cambridge University and his PhD, also at Cambridge and exploring the barriers to participation in heritage, was published as Beyond The Glass Case in 1991.
Dismantling those barriers has been the thread running throughout his career, and Nick has held roles at the Museum of London, the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, Manchester Museum, and the Horniman Museum and Gardens, where he was Chief Executive and Director of Content. Under Merrimans’s leadership at the Horniman, the south London museum with its displays of anthropology, natural history and musical instruments, won Art Fund Museum of the Year 2022 for its work on acknowledging the museum’s colonial legacy and in engaging the public with the climate and biodiversity crisis.
Merriman also chaired the National Museum Directors’ Council’s working group on Environment and Ecology, and led the UK Museum COP to discuss these issues in October 2023. He recently edited the volume ‘Museums and the Climate Crisis’ (Routledge 2024) and ‘Returning The Benin Bornzes. A case study of the Horniman’s restitution’ (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
Sarah Sutton and John Frasierthe call for pilot studies and testing of techniques has passed. The models are obvious, and visitors expect to see museums standing up for climate action …
Sarah Sutton is CEO of Environment & Culture Partners (ECP), a US-based non-profit accelerating environmental leadership of the cultural sector. ECP’s flagship collaborative projects are the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, a grant program supporting museums’ energy efficiency and clean energy projects; and Culture over Carbon, an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant researching energy use in museums. Sutton is the Cultural Sector Lead for America is All In, a multi-sector coalition of 4000+ US organizations supporting the Paris Agreement. She is co-author of The Green Museum and author of Environmental Sustainability at Historic Sites & Museums.
Why should you attend greenloop?
greenloop is blooloop’s ground-breaking sustainability conference. The online event brings together thought leaders from all sectors of the industry for discussion of how visitor attractions can lessen their environmental impact and meet climate goals.
Tickets for greenloop start from as little as £10 when purchasing a group ticket. Join us on 30 April!
