Worm spent a morning at the 'What Next? Climate Change' London subgroup meeting coordinated by Julie's Bicycle, which is a fantastic organisation that creates strategies for a low-carbon arts and cultural sector. Worm has been working with Julie's Bicycle for the past couple of months on the Seven Climate Trends campaign.

What Next? Climate Change is a national community of individuals working in the arts with an interest in culturally mitigating climate change and it was good to meet other arts practitioners including representatives from Arts Admin, Invisible Dust, the Arts Council, ONCA and more.

This session was held at the UK House of Lords and chaired by Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey, who has done amazing work on social and environmental justice, and fights for human rights against modern slavery in global supply chains.

It was meaningful to hear presentations by Farah Ahmed of Julie’s Bicycle, artist Gavin Porter and writer and poet Zena Edwards, who also showed 'Blind Spot' at the event. Each speaker vocalised the very real challenges for marginalised folks in engaging with, working or participating in climate arts. They spoke about how 'diversity', or a better term 'representation', is a necessity for arts practitioners, institutions and funders to actively work with, in order to dismantle the currently far from inclusive structures in environmentalism and the cultural sector.

Given the building we sat in, steeped in white supremacy and colonial history, hearing queer, black, poc, working class voices talk about representation in environmentalism and the arts resonated loudly with so much strength. Quite a moment to call out white guilt and fragility in the House of Lords and address the urgency of intersectional climate justice!

Take a read of this blog post on Julie's Bicycle site about diversity and climate art by Harpreet Kaur, a creative consultant and participant of Julie's Bicycle's inaugural Creative Climate Leadership Course in March 2016.

What next? Well, a lot of work to get on with...