Creative industries building us a brighter future

Good news! There’s a serious buzz amidst the creative industries (CIs) and it’s all about sustainability.

Never before have we had such a surge of interest from across the UK – from Bristol to York, Glasgow to Leicester – we’re certainly not short of ambitious, well-networked individuals and organisations from within the CIs who are up for tackling the big societal and environmental challenges ahead, and grabbing the endless opportunities they create.

The Creative Industries Sustainability Beacon project, which we’re running for the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network, is making good headway.

We’ve just published our “Snapshot Review” of the CI’s activity on sustainability. The review gives a brief account of who’s doing what in the CIs on sustainability issues. We highlight some of the best work and organisations out there, working hard to promote, enable and practice sustainable, creative business models.

The top line is that there’s a lot of activity going on right now and evidence of some really encouraging work. However, though encouraging, this will need scaling up and accelerating as it’s simply not commensurate to the scale and urgency of the challenges we face.

In other words, it is by no means mainstream. But this doesn’t mean there is not an appetite to change this. On the contrary – those we have met, interviewed and heard from along the way are keen to find ways to scale this up and enable the CIs to exploit the many opportunities behind the challenges. The rest of this project is looking at exactly that, and asking, ‘how can the creative industries lead us to a sustainable future?’

In September we ran two action planning workshops with creatives in Bristol and Manchester. The participants used our four Climate Futures scenarios to think long-term. The scenarios describe four plausible worlds in 2030 that differ according to how we respond socially and politically to critical issues such as climate change, resource shortages and population growth.

Considering the major implications for the CIs across the four scenarios, the teams focused on practical ideas to create a more sustainable future in the near to long-term.

We’ll be publishing a final project report with key ‘provocations’ for the CIs in November, along with some handy tools and pointers to help kick-start positive change across the industries.

You can find out more about this project and other related events, on our project page or contact Fiona Bennie.