UNESCO

How do you learn an environment you don’t know? How do you see and understand change in an environment that you do know? And what do you do with this understanding – how do you act with it and how do you share it?

These questions were the foundation of the workshop Climate, Heritage, and Policy: Dialogues in Learning held 27-29 May 2026 at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. It recognized that new environments have always challenged us to learn them. Now the many environments in which we live are changing rapidly. These include our physical environments of course, but also our social, cultural, economic, and technological environments. Which raises the question – how are we learning them? Twenty researchers and practitioners in heritage and climate change from across Sweden and from Norway, Denmark, the UK, and France used a framework of learning and dialogue to look beyond what is changing in our many environments to explore how we gather, manage, store, use, and share our experiences of these changes.

This workshop was a project of the UNESCO Chair for Heritage Futures, led by Marcy Rockman with support of Cornelius Holtorf, funding from the Swedish Research Council, and developed in collaboration with and moderated by Creative Futures. A report on this workshop is now complete and shared below. 

Key findings include:

• People matter: personal experience and identity are integral to professional practice and shape questions that are asked and how climate and heritage work are done. 
• Dialogue and play are underused but high-value tools for both collaboration and public engagement; participants ranked dialogic practice as the single most valuable skill to carry forward. 
• Collaboration was the most-requested resource (ahead of time or funding), signaling strong appetite for interdisciplinary and cross-institutional partnerships. 
• Landscape learning proved a useful lens for reframing climate change from a focus on measurements and damage to processes of adaptation and knowledge-building, and policy as a repository of environmental information everyone has a stake in updating. 
• Cultural heritage is an asset to responses to climate change — the many ways in which cultural heritage is approached, shared, and engaged are essential tools for advancing climate justice, beyond and in addition to what should be protected from climate impacts. 

This Kalmar Dialogues workshop has already catalyzed new collaborations, including a peace-building grant proposal centered on the Struve Geodetic Arc, an invitation to join Sweden’s National Heritage Board climate expert group, and new museum-practice exchanges. This report recommends further developing dialogic skills as part of the program of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, and continuing to build a community of practice around the truth & reconciliation and landscape learning frameworks. 

The outcomes of this workshop demonstrate that integrating climate change, cultural heritage, and policy needs more than data — it requires shared frameworks, dialogue, and trust-building across disciplines. This workshop offers an initial, replicable model for this work, with strong participant enthusiasm to extend it further.

The Climate, Heritage, and Policy: Dialogues in Learning Report is available here.