Culture Tells People What to Want: Samata Pattinson on the Culture Global Stocktake.

Perspective · Culture Global Stocktake for Climate Action

Samata Pattinson, founder and CEO of BLACK PEARL, shares her perspective on the Culture Global Stocktake for Climate Action, a global initiative assessing what culture contributes to climate action, what it costs, and what it needs.

Built through open consultation with artists, knowledge holders, researchers, organisations and communities across every region, the stocktake is the first attempt to make that assessment in the language of the climate negotiations. Its central ask is clear: that culture be recognised as a driver of climate action and written into the Second Global Stocktake and the decisions that follow at COP33.

Culture as more than a sector

The stocktake opens with a definition. Culture is not a sector but the meaning, values, knowledge and practice through which societies understand and respond to the world, carried by a wider ecosystem of people, places and institutions.

It grounds this in human rights and climate justice, recognising that the crisis is rooted in histories of colonisation and extraction, that those least responsible feel its impacts first, and that Indigenous Peoples, people of African descent, local communities, women and young people are among the most affected and among the most important custodians of knowledge.

What it asks of the cultural world

On mitigation, the stocktake holds the cultural ecosystem to account. That means cutting emissions across production, touring, venues and digital infrastructure, building shared ways of measuring them, and ending fossil fuel sponsorship and investment. It calls on advertising, media and communications to stop serving fossil fuel expansion and to make lower-consumption living visible and desirable. Culture, it argues, is how new social norms take hold.

On adaptation, heritage sits at the centre. Most national adaptation plans still leave culture out, and the stocktake positions cultural venues as community resilience hubs when extreme weather strikes.

On loss and damage, it names what climate change is erasing: languages, rituals, sacred landscapes, ancestral land and the sense of belonging that holds communities together. These losses, it argues, must be recognised and funded even when they cannot be priced.

Money, technology and people

The stocktake is direct about funding. Culture-based climate action is badly underfunded, and it calls on climate funds to open dedicated windows, give communities direct access, and resource grassroots movements, including those facing the growing criminalisation of peaceful protest.

It welcomes digital tools for preserving heritage and widening participation, while naming the environmental cost of artificial intelligence, the use of creative work without consent, and the concentration of power in a handful of platforms. It calls for coordination between ministries of culture, environment, education and finance, real investment in the people doing this work, and a just transition that protects workers, communities and cultural spaces rather than displacing them.

A path forward

The stocktake closes with concrete proposals, and describes itself as a living process, to be reviewed and strengthened as the work moves on.

For Pattinson, the shift it represents is about how change is felt.

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