LIMA, April 19 — The art world has often been criticised for not being sufficiently involved in the fight for environmental preservation. But this is no longer the case. Many museums are mobilising to help preserve territories threatened by global warming.

Peru is particularly affected by the environmental crisis. Global warming has caused the melting of 51 per cent of the surface of the country’s glaciers in the last 50 years, while deforestation is affecting the biodiversity of regions like Cajamarca, Cuzco, Húanuco and Ucayali.

Faced with the scale of the problem, Pedro Castillo’s government has decided to establish new conservation areas to protect the fauna and flora, as well as local communities. The Galleries Commit collective has decided to contribute to the project by joining forces with the Art into Acres association. The two organisations recently announced that they had created the Chuyapi-Urusayhua Regional Conservation Area to safeguard more than 80,000 hectares of Peruvian rainforest. This territory is a veritable carbon sink, like some tropical mountain forests located on the African continent.

Galleries Commit has been working on the development of the Chuyapi-Urusayhua Regional Conservation Area for the past decade, with on-the-ground assistance from the Amazon Conservation Association. This project really took off when more than 40 museums and art organisations gave it their financial support. Among them are the museums of contemporary art in Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the magazine Artforum, and the Frank Elbaz and Hauser & Wirth galleries. Most of the donations received averaged US$150 (RM638), although some exceeded US$9,000.

For Laura Lupton, co-founder of Galleries Commit, this initiative shows how easy it can be to participate in the preservation of land threatened by the climate crisis. "Funding land conservation is a high impact and low effort climate action,” she told The Art Newspaper, "[It is] a powerful pathway to collective action. It also results in a tangible thing we can point to and say, ‘We supported that, together!”

Green transformation underway

Now that the Chuyapi-Urusayhua Regional Conservation Area has been established, Galleries Commit is focused on creating tools to accompany the art world in its green transformation. The collective is currently working with Artists Commit, its artist-led sister organisation, on a second round of reports on the climate impact of exhibitions.

Recent years have seen an increasing number of arts organisations take up the environmental issue. In the United Kingdom, a toolkit was launched in late January to support museums in the country in their ecological transition. This initiative offers museum staff the opportunity to take a training course — either in person or remotely — to think about ways to redesign their operations and engage with audiences to shape a more sustainable future in the face of the climate emergency.

Some museums, such as the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Canada, are going further by rethinking their behind-the-scenes operations. It hired Soren Brothers as curator of climate change to incorporate the issue into the ROM’s operations and programming. In Australia, the new Bundanon Art Museum was built to respond and adapt to the natural disasters facing the country. Proof that mindsets are slowly but surely changing in the art world. — ETX Studio