Developing a toolkit for global museums with SOTM participants: connect the public with your research to advance biodiversity conservation and climate resilience.”

Henry McGhie, Senior Manager and Senior Curator
Amanda Bamford, Senior Career Academic

Ahead of the conference, this informal ice-breaker workshop will help participants understand one another’s interests and research.

Description:

Around the world, thousands of museums present great potential to educate, inform and inspire people about climate change impacts, promoting climate change adaptation and resilience, and promoting climate action, biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. This workshop will develop materials for a ‘toolkit’ of images, key messages, and sources of information, that will be provided to global museums to support them to draw on current research on species on the move. Henry McGhie has a background as an ecologist and is part of international networks of academics and curators who are working to accelerate climate action through museums, drawing on latest scientific research and applied social sciences. He has worked with UNFCCC, IPCC and is a member of the International Council of Museums Sustainability Working Group, which aims to promote climate action and support for the Sustainable Development Goals across the world’s 55,000+ museums. He was, until recently, Head of Collections and Curator of Zoology at Manchester Museum (University of Manchester, UK), where he led environmental work, including the development of permanent galleries, temporary exhibitions, external partnerships, research development, and the broad use and interpretation of collections to address contemporary issues. Prof Amanda Bamford is Academic Co-Lead for Environmental Sustainability across the University of Manchester, with a background as a plant scientist, and a keen interest in social responsibility, public engagement and academic engagement; she lectures on climate change.

The objectives of the present submission are:

• to run a workshop at SOTM to draw on participants’ research to begin to develop the content for a toolkit to provide to museums.
• to support researchers to develop their research impact through contributing to the development of the toolkit
• to develop excellent public events that are critically informed both in terms of science, policy, and diverse experiences of climate change impacts
• to develop a collaborative network of interested academics, policy workers and site/species managers to raise awareness of, and promote constructive engagement with, climate change impacts and actions
• to explore the development of a global/ distributed/ international exhibition or series of exhibitions that could be staged simultaneously or consecutively, for maximum reach and impact, drawing on the toolkit.

Format:

The format would be a workshop where participants were invited to summarise their work, and to consider how their work could be communicated through diverse media. The aims are to generate the research base for the toolkit, which could form the basis of an exhibition[s], and to draw on diverse perspectives in terms of how science could be communicated to non-scientific audiences and/or in highly impactful ways, for example through theatre, performance, song, digital and VR.