Architecture Fringe join The Green Arts Charter

Building upon the longstanding Architecture Fringe tradition of championing transformative and equitable climate action for the common good through a combination of advocacy, collaborations, our festival and wider programming, the team recently decided to sign up to Culture for Climate Scotland’s Green Arts Charter.

The Charter is made up of 4 Pledges - ‘Reduce our emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change’, ‘Inspire our communities and collaborate with others to deliver climate action’, ‘To advocate for climate action and influence for change’ and ‘To embed climate justice in our organisation and any climate action we do’ - that can be approached in a variety of ways. It was developed to provide a framework for Green Arts Initiative members to contribute towards transformational change in and of Scotland’s cultural sector in response to the Climate Emergency and woven throughout the Charter are suggestions of pathways towards climate action. Though there’s also a malleability, enabling signatories to work towards its collective goals in alternative ways that might build upon or play to an organisation's strengths and circumstances.

Signing the Charter is a way for us to publicly take responsibility for continuing to do our best to catalyse, and to recognise, the scale of climate action that we know architecture, our organisation and those who use our platform are capable of realising together and to track our progress with a renewed, resourced focus. We know the Architecture Fringe is not starting a journey anew: climate justice has long been a consistent part of our Core Programming and exploring our relationships to land, landscapes and more than human life have become recurring threads throughout our work - from Homelands, Common Land / Common Good, Towards COP26 and COP or Flop? in 2021 to 2023’s A Fragile Correspondence with -Ism and /Other, 2025’s Recipro-Cities and 2026’s Communal Infrastructures. We hope that publicly and purposefully broadcasting what we do around this important area of work in this way serves to inspire others and perhaps open doors towards, and sow seeds for, emergent collaborations in the future.

Receiving Creative Scotland Multi Year Funding is enabling us to do more and to plan further into the future. One of its conditions is the completion of an annual Environmental Reporting exercise that in turn encourages the weaving of climate action throughout activities and proactive consideration of where an organisation's greatest impact can be. Signing up to the Green Arts Charter and through it connecting all the more so with ongoing climate action efforts across Scotland’s cultural landscape, within and beyond our architectural community and ecology, is but one way we hope to embody, be part of and to realise the kind of change we hope to see as an organisation.

Watch this space, and for how this shows up across our work in the future!