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INTRODUCTION
The Master's degree that I am concluding with this thesis – despite being
irrevocably marked by the pandemic that we are still struggling to overcome
after more than two years – has been surprisingly rich in stimuli from unexpected
contexts. Between the first and second year, a renewed interest towards
sustainability prompted me to ask myself the tipycal questions that
spontaneously arise as soon as one starts exploring this kind of topic. The first
one had to do with the apparent indifference or lack of interest with which most
people approached environmental issues, almost as if it were a matter of social
desirability or a trendy theme, and not because it was actually a pressing
emergency.
Once I finished my exams, I moved to Venice to attend an internship at an
artistic organisation in the city: there, I had the opportunity to get to know a place
whose extraordinariness made it extremely popular all over the world. Venice is
a city with a fascinating history and origins, and its territorial specificities and
geographical location have always played a major role in defining its identity.
Today, it still functions in a totally different way to any other Italian city: life
has the rhythm of water and land, a slow pace unconstrained by wheels of any
kind. Its majestic slowness contrasts with the overwhelming amount of people
who every day reach the city for tourism, work or study, who crowd the
Calatrava, the Ponte degli Scalzi and the beginning of Strada Nuova, only to get
lost in the city's labyrinth and get in the way of the Venetians' swift pace, who
know the tangle of calli by heart and are hardly enchanted by the millions of
details that the city's architecture effortlessly offers at every turn.
Venice is a case study in terms of sustainability for a number of reasons, and
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although it is not climate change that causes the phenomenon of acqua alta, the
lagoon ecosystem on which the city relies is now fragile and strained by repeated
human interventions aimed at making it more liveable. The infrastructures, the
transport system, the countless attractions and the local economy suffer from
mass tourism, although they are heavily dependent on it. The local population –
now decimated – suffocates among visitor accommodations, counterfeit
products imitating ancient Venetian craftsmanship and food and wine
establishments where the price-quality ratio is rarely considered. It is indeed
these dynamics that make Venice a privileged observation point for the
intersection of the three dimensions of sustainability – environmental, social and
economic – and a strategic hub for the study of solutions in this sense, as the
variety of organisations active on this front throughout the city testify.
The cultural aspect – which has emerged within the debate on sustainability
in recent years (Nurse, 2006) – underlies and characterises the entire Venetian
context, expressing itself in local folklore and in the rich artistic offer which
attracts international attention. Living in Venice, it is virtually impossible not to
come across exhibitions and cultural events related to sustainability: in
particular, Andreco's installation and mural on the Santa Lucia complex next to
the train station aroused my curiosity and prompted me to explore the theme of
environmental sustainability and climate change. Andreco is an Italian artist –
but also an environmental engineer – and has been developing his creative output
driven by his curiosity about the relationship between human beings and the
natural world – a theme that is particularly contemporary and urgent given the
climate crisis affecting our time.
“In the climate change era the environment needs new
symbols to withstand. We are in the century of the
environmental crisis and my artwork is affected by it. My
research is focused on the relation between humans and
nature and between the built environment and the natural
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landscape.”
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In particular, Venice is home to the fourth part of a concept launched by
Andreco in 2015 in Paris during COP21: Climate Art Project is a
multidisciplinary project that combines art, science and activism, and consists of
a series of interventions made in different cities around the world
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– specifically,
Paris, Bologna, Bari, Venice and Delhi. Each intervention addresses a macro-
theme related to climate change and contextualises it at a local level, bridging
the gap that typically exists between the majority of the world's population, who
live in urbanised environments seemingly far from the threat of climate change,
and its consequences. In Venice, Andreco's project takes the form of a mural
graphically depicting the predicted rise in sea level over the next few decades in
the absence of mitigation measures, and an installation aimed at recalling the
importance of safeguarding the lagoon ecosystem, evoking – through an
impactful visual narrative – the themes of global warming and loss of
biodiversity. In this sense, it is useful to report the view of Rice et al. (2019, p.
131), who argue that art "has ways of addressing mutability and change at global
and local levels that science may not, and that art can transcend language and
unite cultures through nonverbal communication and sensing or perceiving the
world around us".
Climate 04 – along with the several other artistic initiatives on the subject
within the city – prompted me to reflect first of all on the Venetian context, and
on the role played by the city's socio-cultural fabric in raising awareness on
sustainability issues. Since this is a rather broad topic, I decided to drive the
focus of this thesis on climate change – a phenomenon of anthropogenic origin
that crowds academic and political debates, newspapers and often even the
streets, through grassroots movements such as Fridays for Future, to cite one of
the most recent examples.
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Andreco Studio – https://www.andreco.org/statement/
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Climate Art Project – https://www.climateartproject.com
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Climate change has been defined in a variety of ways – a super-wicked
problem (Levin et al., 2012; Riedy, 2013; Saab, 2019), the greatest health threat
of this century (WHO, 2015), or even the greatest challenge of our time
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– yet
for decades it has been suffering the scepticism, denialism and disregard of a
large-enough segment of the population that it has only recently become a
priority on government policy agendas – with some significant exceptions.
Obviously, lobbies interested in maintaining a fossil fuel-intensive system have
played an extremely influential political role in fostering dissent from the claims
of the scientific community, which for decades has been frantically collecting
every piece of empirical evidence possible to support its arguments for the
existence of climate change and the pressing need to take measures to mitigate
it.
The first chapter of this thesis provides a description of the phenomenon
from a scientific point of view, with the main aim of underlining its complexity,
magnitude and urgency. Given the role of anthropogenic activities in its
development, the chapter will briefly outline the efforts carried out by the
international community to handle it. In the final part, the emergency of climate
change will be embedded in the wider framework of sustainability.
In the second chapter, the main focus will be the communication of climate
change, beginning from the limits of traditional scientific dissemination and the
general difficulty in conveying scientific matters. Afterwards, the scope will be
narrowed to the field of climate change communication – positioned at the
intersection between scientific, environmental and risk communication – and
characterized by a high degree of interdisciplinarity. The analysis will be centred
on the shortcomings of traditional approaches to such communication, aimed at
transmitting information and anchored to the assumption that this will suffice to
involve people and convince them that climate change is an issue that requiring
individual action. After retracing the evolution of climate change
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2013 IPCC co-chair Thomas F. Stocker stated that “Climate change is the greatest
challenge of our time...In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.” (Gilis, 2013).
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communication, current perspectives will be outlined, shedding light on
interesting lines of research dealing with the arts, that will be the main subject
of the last chapter.
After describing climate change as a scientific phenomenon and delving into
the criticalities of its communication, the last section will indeed highlight the
role that the arts could play in conveying the issue, as they naturally address the
main shortcomings of traditional climate change communication. By noting the
increasingly relevant role of culture in the debate around sustainability, and
specifically, by underlining how climate change is often defined also as a cultural
challenge (Buckland, 2012; Giannachi, 2012), the third chapter will support the
view that the arts could provide a remarkable contribute in raising environmental
consciousness. After outlining the main features of art that outclass traditional
climate change communication, its fruitful – but rather neglected – relationship
with science will also be investigated, in order to show how they can benefit
from each other, and how such synergy could be harnessed to counteract climate
change. The final part will deal with the analysis of a few practical examples in
this sense.
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CHAPTER 1
CLIMATE CHANGE: WHY THE TOPIC IS URGENT
In order to understand the difficulties inherent the communication of climate
change, the following chapter will provide an overview of the phenomenon,
depicting its complexity, magnitude and urgency. Given the role of
anthropogenic activities in its development, the efforts carried out by the
international community to handle it will be briefly outlined. Finally, the
emergency of climate change will be embedded in the wider framework of
sustainability.
1.1. Climate change: key concepts
Climate change is defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC, 2018a) as “any change in climate over time, whether due to
natural variability or as a result of human activity”. In order to fully understand
this definition, a few concepts should be broken down, beginning with the notion
of climate. The IPCC (2018a) makes a distinction between a narrow sense of the
concept, referring to the average weather, and a wider one, identifying the state
of the climate system. The terms climate and weather are often used
interchangeably, although identifying different spatial and temporal dimensions:
weather refers indeed to the atmospheric conditions occurring locally over short
periods of time, such as thunderstorms, winds, snow, rain, clouds or floods
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.
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NASA – Global Climate Change – Vital Signs of the Planet – Overview: Weather,
Global Warming and Climate Change. Retrieved December 12, 2021 from
https://climate.nasa.gov/resources/global-warming-vs-climate-change/
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Climate refers to the average temperature, humidity and rainfall patterns
observed regionally or even globally over longer timescales
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: its variations are
therefore observable over more extended periods of time, and may be due to
internal processes, occurring within the climate system, or to external forcings
(IPCC, 2018a).
Similarly, climate change and global warming are often confused or thought to
be synonims, probably because of the strict, yet complex, interrelationship
between the two. Within the scientific community, the expression “climate
change” is generally used to describe the complex long-term variations affecting
Earth’s weather patterns and climate systems, encompassing extreme weather,
rising seas and melting glaciers as well as increasing average temperatures
(Nunez, 2019), the latter being indeed the major driver of such events.
As reported by Donev et al. (2018) climate changes have always been part of the
terrestrial system and occurred as a result of natural processes, mainly driven by
variations in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the subsequent alterations in
the amount of solar energy our planet receives, the cooling and warming cycles
of the oceans and volcanic activities. As reported by the National Research
Council (2020), in the past all the major changes in climate produced remarkable
consequences, such as alterations in land surface and ocean circulation,
population migrations and the extinction of animal and vegetal species. Despite
being disruptive, they took place over extremely extended time periods: in the
recent history of our planet, the largest global-scale climate changes were the ice
age cycles
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, recurring approximately every 100,000 years (ibidem). These
periods of glacial advance and retreat were mainly paced by variations in the
orbit of the Earth around the Sun, which led to changes in the amount and
distribution of solar energy received by our planet and therefore in global
average temperature (ibidem).
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ibidem
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i.e. glacial periods followed by shorter warmer periods, or interglacials. (National
Research Council, 2020)
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1.2 Human-induced global warming
Today, the climate change we are experiencing differs from the past ones
for two prominent features: the rapidity with which it is occurring and its
anthropogenic origin. Its main driver is in fact the rise in global average
temperature that has been characterizing the past few decades, namely global
warming. The IPCC (2018a) defines the concept as “the estimated increase
in global mean surface temperature (GMST) averaged over a 30-year period,
expressed relative to the pre-industrial levels
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unless otherwise specified”. In
other words, it refers to the increase of global temperatures the world has been
witnessing since the Industrial Revolution. During that period, the burning of
fossil fuels – such as coal, oil and natural gas – generated about 2 billion tonnes
of carbon dioxide: by 1950, industrial emissions produced three times that
quantity, while today they are close to 20 times that much (The Economist,
2019). According to the IPCC (2021), current atmospheric concentration of
carbon dioxide is unprecedented in the past 800,000 years, and grew at a rate
that is 250 times faster than it was, out of natural sources, at the end of the last
ice age (NASA, 2011).
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i.e. the reference period is 1850 – 1900.
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