Next Season | Arts and Climate Change in Costa Rica

For effective implementation of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), it is crucial that messaging on the climate emergency—and strategies for its mitigation and adaptation to it—reach wider audiences beyond the scientific community and policy-makers.

Strong community engagement is essential to ensuring that the processes of developing public climate policies are fruitful, transparent, and benefit everyone. However, ensuring that messages about climate change are communicated to citizens in a straightforward and accessible manner, without neglecting their urgency and complexity, remains one of the greatest challenges for governments, scientists, multilateral institutions, and the media.

To this end, the artistic community can make an important contribution by fostering a critical reflection, participatory debate, the visualization of alternative and future scenarios, and the emotional and intellectual motivation to address climate change profoundly.

The project Next Season – Arts and Climate Change in Costa Rica was created with the objective of bridging the artistic sector and the climate conversation, encouraging the communication of the issue in different ways within civil society.

Undertaken by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), in partnership with the Directorate of Climate Change of the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE), Next Season will foster the creation of alternative opportunities for discussion and critical reflection on decarbonization and climate change adaptation goals, as well as on the prospects for community engagement in achieving them.

Artists and scientists will work side by side imagining new scenarios and creating knowledge that will inform the public through creative approaches. The Costa Rican population will actively participate in the project through exhibitions, workshops, activities, and other artistic interventions.

Next Season's main ambition is to foment artistic expressions that establish an affective, narrative, and interdisciplinary communication around the goals of decarbonization and adaptation to climate change, in order to make visible the most abstract aspects of this process using different aesthetic strategies.

OBJECTIVES

• Develop a strategy of participation and communication to draw the conversation on adaptation to climate change and environmental sustainability closer to communities, involving them directly and actively through the arts.
• Provide incentives and a creative framework for Costa Rican artists, and especially young artists, empowering them to create solutions and contribute to a vision of the future they want to be a part of.
• Humanize and demystify the traditional approach to climate change adaptation and decarbonization, promoting a more direct and emotional contribution from the whole population—including closer attention to gender, wellness and mental health issues, diversity, and social inclusion in the processes and objectives of decarbonization and climate change adaptation.
• Contribute to international processes of re-visualizing climate change adaptation and decarbonization, emphasizing the importance of self-expression and the arts in shaping an effective adaptation to climate change.
• Promote the development and enhancement of aesthetic language and artistic expression that represent contemporary visions of environmental issues, including climate change adaptation and sustainable development.

FUNDERS