Calls for cultural engagement in sustainability are growing as global ecological crises continue to escalate and efforts to foster sustainability lag. Scholars are increasingly encountering ways in which the arts and environmental sustainability can intersect to advance new forms of engagement and insight toward sustainability goals. However, scholarship at this intersection is highly cross-disciplinary and disparate as a result. This article initiates an exercise of conceptualizing the scholarly field of Sustainability and the Arts (SATA). The research presented here explores literature on the core concepts of sustainability, the arts, and scholarship, and seeks to examine the spaces where these concepts intersect. Understanding this scholarly landscape will be critical to identifying priorities for making impactful and significant scholarly contributions in an emerging field. Literature was collected through snowball sampling and targeted literature searches, with the goal of identifying foundational and influential texts informing how these concepts are framed in diverse contexts. From the literature, we outline some of the key elements that characterize each of these concepts and complicate their operationalizations. This article articulates the first functional definition for SATA as a field which integrates traditional and expanded understandings of scholarship and the arts, applying these combined capacities through the lens of sustainability. We characterize SATA as a cross-disciplinary, emergent, and pluriversal scholarly field. This research provides critical insight to scholars and artists working in SATA, allowing for a cohesive body of scholarly work which can amplify the impact of collaborative activities between the arts and environmental sectors.

BACKGROUND:Climate change poses significant and escalating threats to public health globally, affecting physical and mental health through direct impacts such as extreme weather events and indirect pathways including food insecurity and displacement. Despite growing recognition of culture and the arts as potential resources for health promotion and climate action, the specific role of the arts in addressing climate-related health impacts remains under-explored and suboptimally integrated into public health and environmental policy frameworks. OBJECTIVE:To investigate the role of the arts in addressing the health impacts of climate change from the perspective of experts working at the intersections of arts, health, and climate action. METHODS:A cross-sectional survey study using snowball sampling recruited participants with self-identified expertise at the intersections of arts, health, and climate change. The survey instrument collected qualitative data on perceived roles of arts-based interventions in this domain and barriers to their implementation. Responses were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify key themes and patterns. RESULTS:Seventy-nine participants (N = 79) from diverse geographic regions globally completed the survey. Analysis revealed four meaningful roles that the arts can play in addressing climate-related health impacts: (1) bringing people together to build community and solidarity; (2) raising awareness and communicating complex information; (3) solving problems collectively; and (4) providing space for emotional processing and healing. Four primary barriers to expanding arts-based work were identified: (1) funding limitations; (2) other resource constraints; (3) collaboration challenges; and (4) lack of recognition and legitimacy. CONCLUSIONS:The arts offer multiple pathways for addressing the health impacts of climate change, though structural barriers limit their implementation and scale. Findings have implications for policymakers, climate scientists, artists, and healthcare professionals seeking to integrate arts-based approaches into climate-health interventions and adaptation strategies.

This study examines the barriers and drivers to student-led mobilization for sustainability in higher education institutions (HEIs) across Canada. Findings indicate that the most common barrier to student mobilization was a lack of political opportunities and social capital. In response, the findings indicate that the primary drivers that student-led sustainability groups used to overcome barriers included: sharing framing perspectives to inspire and motivate action across campuses, using social networks to borrow and leverage social capital from other stakeholders, and impacting campus stakeholder behaviors resulting in the creation of a culture of sustainability. Social movement theories have been applied to the barriers and drivers to student-led action in order to provide a deeper understanding of how students mobilize on campuses. The findings suggest that while students may struggle to elicit policy changes across HEIs due to common barriers, their efforts can successfully shift the campus culture of sustainability. This study addresses an identified need for more literature investigating sustainability activism in higher education more broadly and more specifically fills a gap in our understanding of how student activism may contribute to social change.

There is an increasing interest and effort in reorienting university curricula to address sustainability and preparing teachers to get involved in embedding sustainability and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in teaching and curricula enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Evidence shows that this interest and effort is often prevented by various barriers at three levels: teacher- level barriers, school-level barriers, and system-level barriers. In this study, the attempt was geared towards identifying the constituencies of these three levels of barriers and examining the extent to which they predict teachers’ motivation to embed sustainability and SDGs in various school subject areas, including arts-based education. A survey of 1253 teachers in Malaysia revealed that the teacher- and system-level barriers explain 83% of the motivation variance. By identifying, addressing, and investigating these barriers, higher education institutions—and especially teacher education—could be better informed in reorienting university curricula to embed ICT-enabled Education for Sustainability (ICTeEfS). These results were also used in planning and implementing in-service teacher training interventions in the context of a European Commission Erasmus+-funded project.

The arts have a unique way of affecting the way that people feel about environmental issues in ways that other forms of communication cannot. The National Arts Centre (NAC) Climate Cycle was a program that the NAC English Theatre developed as a response to the escalating climate crisis to engage artists deeply in discussions on climate change and to grapple with how the performing arts can respond. It took place over two meetings: the Summit in Banff in 2019, which was in person, and the Green Rooms in 2020, which was online. To answer our main question of how participating in these events impacted artists' behaviour and professional practices, we engaged with the participants through a series of surveys and in-depth interviews. Based on the results, we found that artists were impacted in three main ways: (1) instilling a sense of community among the participants; (2) encouraging the participants to continue their learning; and (3) enacting strategies to 'green' their practices, such as reducing touring and using alternative materials in set design. This project was helpful in understanding how the Cycle impacted artists, but it also contributed to our overall understanding of what meaningful engagement with artists on environmental topics looks like. This project was first completed as part of an undergraduate thesis in May 2021. In this most recent article, we reflect on what this research means a year later.

In the face of the climate emergency, it is becoming clear that cultural change is a necessary transformative shift that must occur to ensure human survival. Climate change is entangled with behavioural and social dimensions of our lives, necessitating that we undergo cultural transformation to access the potential of existing climate solutions. While there is both an increase in research regarding how the arts can contribute to this needed cultural transformation, as well as increasing participation in climate work by those within the arts sector, the marriage between evidence and practice in this field is in its infancy. Existing literature highlights the exciting potential of the arts to make meaningful contributions to climate action through interdisciplinary contributions to knowledge creation, public engagement forums that go beyond fact-sharing, and imagining future scenarios for our world. That said, arts organizations are often left out of the conversation. In an effort to bridge the gap between study and practice in this field, this paper reports on interviews with key members of CreativePEI to better understand how one arts organization and its members conceptualize their role in climate action as well as identifying critical barriers to conducting climate work within the arts. Further, the paper situates the results of the study within the current literature, examining any synergies between the findings of the study and scholarly works in the field. By showcasing the ways in which one arts organization situates itself within the broader project of climate change, this work sheds new light on the current state of climate work in the arts in Canada and how cultural organizations can reimagine their role to better align with the evidence about what the arts can uniquely offer to climate action.

In the context of the global climate change debate, the integration of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in higher education institutions (HEIs) has been identified as one of the top priorities. This paper presents the CoDesignS ESD Framework (hereafter “Framework”) focused on HEIs, though the Framework is applicable to other types of educational institutions. The Framework introduces transformative pedagogies and teaching methods that extend beyond typical ESD competencies, encompassing cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral domains for a holistic design and delivery. It was evaluated using a focus group and interviews among sustainability practitioners and academics, learning and curriculum designers, students, and government officials involved in ESD. The evaluation demonstrates key stakeholders’ engagement with the Framework and appreciation of its potential to integrate sustainability into university curricula across different disciplines. The findings suggest that the Framework is easy to use, making sustainability explicit in the curriculum and actively developing the competencies students require to bring about change beyond the classroom. The feedback received has helped the further development of the Framework, including the CoDesignS ESD Toolkit Planner and Dashboard, which provide a more effective way of integrating the learning design and ESD components embedded as part of the CoDesignS ESD pillars.

Addressing global climate change beyond short-term fixes requires wider cultural change. Artists, as cultural workers, play a valuable role in attending to questions of social and ecological justice. While there is growing artistic engagement with environmental research, there are few studies which critically explore the confluence of contemporary art, sustainability, and informal education within Canada. Using a framework of poetics (poiesis), this study explores how an environmentally engaged arts practice is a form of transformative environmental education. We interviewed 24 current Canada-based visual, installation, and performance artists to understand how they conceptualize their role in fostering socioecological transformations. We used an inductive thematic coding scheme to analyze transcripts and compared emergent themes to current ecocritical literature. Results reveal a framework of artist-researcher-teacher as facilitator of conviviality, curiosity, and care, showing the agency of artists and a need for poetics in environmental work, research, and education.

To contribute to achieving local and global sustainability, we propose a novel educational methodology, called field environmental philosophy (FEP), which orients ecotourism practices to reconnect citizens and nature. FEP is based on the systemic approach of the biocultural ethic that values the vital links among the life habits of co-inhabitants (humans and other-than-humans) who share a common habitat. Based on this “3Hs” model (habitats, co-inhabitants, habits), FEP combines tourism with experiential education to reorient biocultural homogenization toward biocultural conservation. FEP’s methodological approach seeks to integrate social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability by generating new links between biological and cultural diversity at different spatial and social scales. Ecotourism has an underutilized potential to link sciences with education and conservation practices at different scales. By incorporating a philosophical foundation, FEP broadens both understanding and practices of environmental education and sustainable tourism. FEP has been developed at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, Chile, at the southern end of the Americas since 2000, where it has oriented transdisciplinary work for the creation of new protected areas and ecotourism practices. FEP enables an integration of biophysical, cultural, and institutional dimensions into the design of ecotourism activities that transform and broaden the perceptions of tourists, local guides, students, and other participants to better appreciate local biological and cultural diversity. FEP’s methodology is starting to be adapted in other world regions, such as Germany, Japan, and Mexico, to integrate education and ecotourism for sustainability.

Early childhood environmental education focusses on expanding children’s bio-affinity, developing their environmental attitudes and encouraging them to behave in a more environmentally friendly manner. One example of the educational method that is based on high-quality practices of both early childhood education and environmental education is the Reggio-Emilia pedagogical approach, which provides children with various nature-related experiences. This study examines the frequency and variety of indoor and outdoor nature experiences for children and the preschool teachers’ educational approaches and goals for children’s development in nature in two Reggio-Emilia preschools located in Halifax, Canada. To do this, first-hand observations and semi-structured teacher interviews were used. Results suggest that the Reggio-Emilia curriculum followed at the preschools provided various opportunities for children to be exposed to nature. However, the teachers have emphasized more on anthropocentric than nature-related educational goals.

This paper provides a review of the current literature that examines the uptake of sustainability policies in higher education. Articles were retrieved from both ERIC and Scopus databases and then manually reviewed to ensure that they focused on each of: higher education; sustainability; and policy. A total of 91 articles were analysed using a multi-stage process that involved sorting data according to typologies (i.e. temporal, terminology, methodology, geography), coding the text of the articles based on topical content, and an indexing method used to label data for further analysis and the development of broader code categories. Results suggest that drivers and barriers associated with the integration of sustainability policy in higher education are well known; yet increased research is needed to understand best practices and processes by which sustainability can be furthered through higher education policy. In addition, findings demonstrate the need for future research to focus on various aspects of the policy process, including policy development and enactment, and on implications of policy for practice. While there have been some reviews of sustainability policy in higher education research to date, this review contributes to this literature by highlighting research primarily focused on sustainability policy within higher education.

The Arts shows great promise in working toward a sustainable future as they can have a significant influence on the development of cultural norms. Using bibliometrics, this study uncovers the current body of scholarly literature related to the intersection of sustainability and the Arts. The results show that while there are very few articles (n = 77) published in scholarly journals related to this area, the number of manuscripts and the number of journals publishing manuscripts related to this subject area is increasing. Further, while there is no one individual who stands out to date as a leader in this field, the results show that Australia and Canada have produced the most published articles. Finally, this study demonstrates that scholarly articles related to the Arts and sustainability are mostly being published in well-established interdisciplinary sustainability-related journals and journals associated with the field of education for sustainable development. The results of this study give a more definitive answer to the question: what scholarly literature resources currently exist on the intersection of the Arts and sustainability and offers the scholarly community a better idea of what and how those involved in this area are publishing and mobilizing knowledge regarding their work.

Many barriers restrict children's access to nature resulting in negative consequences, including a lack of opportunities to learn and engage with the natural environment. Fortunately, environmental education programs offer participants an opportunity to counteract these challenges. While the benefits of environmental education as measured by pre-determined outcomes are well documented, research focused on participants' perceptions and preferences related to their environmental learning experiences continues to be under-represented in the literature. Using a pre-/post-test survey approach, this study aimed to explore how an earth education summer camp, Sunship Earth TM, contributed to participants environmental learning experiences. Results suggest that Sunship Earth TM provides children with various EL opportunities that help to increase their understanding of some ecological concepts. Results also suggest that this learning experience may have helped to broaden participants' understanding of environmental issues and actions, as well as enhance feelings of care, interest, and responsibility towards the environment.

Education plays an essential role in tackling humanity's many environmental problems. Musicians, like other artists, may sometimes address environmental themes in their work. Whether or not they view themselves as such, they may at times act as environmental educators, communicators, and advocates through their art and other activities. We interviewed a cohort of musicians who engaged with environmental issues, both onstage and offstage, to uncover the parameters and impacts of this engagement on their lives in the music industry. Authenticity emerged as a prominent theme, as well as many perceived challenges, risks, mitigation strategies, and rewards associated with this work.

Within Nova Scotia the ocean has an integral role in the economy and culture of the province.Nova Scotia is home to abundant marine resources and a rapidly developing ocean technology sector.Despite the importance of this resource and access to resources, youth in Nova Scotia have exhibited low knowledge of basic ocean concepts.This study investigates the extent to which the internationally established Ocean Literacy Principles are included in the curriculum outcomes of the Nova Scotia high school science curriculum.Data analysis of all high school science curriculum documents were guided by the seven Ocean Literacy Principles and the supporting fundamental concepts.Results from this study reveal limited inclusion of ocean concepts throughout the high school science curriculum.The effect of the diminished and marginalized inclusion of ocean education is the production of individuals with limited knowledge of basic ocean principles, who are ill prepared to make informed decisions regarding the health of the ocean and the future of Nova Scotia.