The terminology of environmental consciousness and carbon emissions has shifted significantly in recent decades, from talk of the greenhouse effect to global warming and sustainable development, and now from climate change to the climate emergency. The 2016 United Nations Paris Agreement set specific and binding goals on climate action to reduce emissions by at least 50% by 2030, and in recent years several initiatives springing from the contemporary art and museums sector finally represent real engagement and advocacy for change. For example, ART 2030, Ki Culture, and artist Tino Sehgal have produced the Getting Climate Control Under Control Declaration to encourage the urgent review of practices such as climate control in gallery exhibition spaces. Founded in 2020, the Gallery Climate Coalition offers tools and resources that enable member galleries, as well as organisations and individuals, to calculate and pledge to reduce the carbon footprint of their activities, especially those related to travel and shipping.

Since its inception in 2005, Latitudes has been active in this debate. And as we begin to work on the formation of a new Spanish chapter of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC España) with colleagues and other members, our thoughts turn back to an essay by curator Stephanie Smith which we commissioned for Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, the publication we produced for the Royal Society of Arts pioneering Arts & Ecology programme in 2006. In the text Stephanie lamented that art museums had largely been sitting out the larger conversation about integrating “sustainable habits into deep, daily practice.” With current initiatives such as MoMA’s ‘Circular Museum’ webinars, and the Whitechapel Gallery’s and GCC’s ‘Climate Crisis >> Art Action’, a two-day symposium tackling the critical environmental issues facing public arts institutions (2–3 March 2023), it seems that such debates in the field are, at last, not only the utopian “dreams of a dreamer.”