• Frontpage /
• Sustainability by Creative Sector /

Cultural Heritage and Museums

Museums can elevate living cultural heritage as a force for change and transform museums into places where people gather to build a more sustainable future. Valuing traditional knowledge, skills, and materials offers alternatives to consumer culture.

Susanna Kekkonen

Cultural heritage is created as a result of human activity and interaction with the environment. It reflects changes in values, beliefs, knowledge, skills, and traditions. Cultural heritage can be tangible, intangible, or digital, and it can relate to cultural or natural environments. Cultural heritage is renewed, preserved, and passed onto future generations. This is how cultural heritage is defined in the Finnish Government Resolution for the Cultural Heritage Strategy 2023–2030. The strategy elevates sustainability as a key value alongside diversity and equality. For the first time, the strategy comprehensively examines Finland’s cultural heritage: it is everywhere and part of everyone’s life.

The strategy’s vision emphasises the importance of cultural heritage as a societal resource and a means to improve people’s quality of life: cultural heritage acts as a bridge between people and offers solutions for building a sustainable future. A pervasive value is also the responsibility to preserve cultural heritage for future generations. The strategy addresses the potential of cultural heritage to increase inclusion, recognise cultural diversity and equality, and promote sustainable development.

Tangible cultural heritage includes objects, artworks, photographs, and scientific materials. Museums preserve cultural heritage on behalf of their communities, research it, and convey information in various ways. Cultural heritage materials also include archival documents and libraries that preserve literary cultural heritage. The cultural environment includes built environments, archaeological sites, and landscapes. Intangible cultural heritage includes oral and behavioral traditions, performing arts, knowledge, skills, and practices.

The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture’s museum policy program, Museum of Opportunities, highlights the societal impact as an important task for museums. Through the preservation and study of cultural heritage, museums have the opportunity to actively promote eco-social literacy and contribute to building sustainable practices. Strengthening living intangible cultural heritage and promoting sustainable development goals are particularly closely linked. Community-based cultural heritage work has a significant impact. By highlighting sustainable practices and lifestyles of living cultural heritage, the potential for cultural change can be harnessed to promote society’s ecological sustainability transition. The cultural heritage of an ecologically sustainable future is being created in the present.

Museums as Heralds and Havens of the Sustainability Transition

The core activities of museums include recording, researching, exhibiting, and sharing information about cultural heritage. These fundamental tasks promote sustainable development goals simultaneously in many ways. Museums, cultural centres, and various cultural sector actors have the opportunity to influence large groups of people and act as pioneers of sustainable practices by creating new, carbon-neutral operating models and actively engaging in environmental and cultural heritage issues.

Valuing and utilising existing knowledge and traditional materials contribute to achieving sustainable development goals and offer alternatives to consumer culture. By activating agency within their communities, museums can elevate the sustainability expertise of living cultural heritage as a force for cultural change and create spaces where people gather to build a more sustainable future.

Cultural environment work has many connections to sustainable development, encompassing its ecological, economic, social, and cultural dimensions. Cultural environments include archaeological heritage, built cultural environments, cultural landscapes, and underwater cultural heritage. Tasks related to the preservation of cultural environments are managed by entities such as the Finnish Heritage Agency, regional and national responsibility museums, and environmental administration. The core of this work is the long-term preservation and use of cultural environments, taking their values into account.

New construction accounts for about 50% of the world’s consumption of natural resources, and the built environment contributes to one-third of all climate emissions. Keeping the existing buildings and infrastructure in good condition and use reduces the burden on the environment and saves natural resources. The cultural environment work of the museum sector supports the conservation of natural resources.

The Finnish Heritage Agency and museums provide guidance, support, advice and grants for the management, maintenance and conservational repair of cultural environments. For example, the cultural environment grants distributed by the Heritage Agency emphasise sustainable development perspectives.

Kulttuuriperinnön ja kulttuuriympäristöjen merkityksestä kestävän kehityksen edistämisessä tarvitaan lisää tutkittua tietoa, jonka tuottamisessa tarvitaan eri tieteenalojen ja toimijoiden yhteistyötä. Tutkittua tietoa tarvitaan myös ilmastonmuutoksen vaikutuksista kulttuuriympäristöihin.

More research is needed on the role of cultural heritage and cultural environments in promoting sustainable development, and cooperation between different disciplines and actors is needed to achieve this. Research is also needed on the impacts of climate change on cultural environments.

Museum Projects and Concrete Sustainability Work

Internal sustainability work in museums has progressed rapidly in the 2020s. Museums have actively measured their carbon footprints, implemented environmental management systems, initiated development projects, and organised further training for their staff. International discussion in the field has resulted as operational models and highlighted best practices.

In Finland, the State Treasury recommends that all government ministries, agencies, and institutions prepare an annual sustainability report. In their sustainability reports, organisations describe how their core activities and expertise contribute to the achievement of identified UN Sustainable Development Goals (the handprint of their operations) and how they manage the direct impacts of their operations on their environment (the footprint of their operations). The first reports were prepared in 2021. For example, in 2023, 57 sustainability reports were prepared across 13 different administrative sectors.

At the agency level, sustainability-related collaboration has been fostered in recent years through the Kestävät virastot (Sustainable Agencies) project. In a joint project involving the Finnish Heritage Agency, the National Archives of Finland, the Governing Body of Suomenlinna, and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, four agencies explored and developed their roles in promoting sustainable development.In the LIVIND – Creative and living cultural heritage as a resource for the Northern Dimension region joint project coordinated by the Finnish Heritage Agency, good practices for the sustainable use of living intangible cultural heritage in tourism, services, and various work and operational methods were identified and collected between 2021 and 2024. The project consisted of online events, workshops, pilot experiments, and research. The materials have been published on a comprehensive English-language online platform, LIVIND.fi.

Several Finnish museums already have the EcoCompass certification from the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation. For example, the National Gallery, Amos Rex, EMMA, Helsinki City Museum, HAM, Aboa Vetus Ars Nova, Turku Museum Centre, Turku Art Museum, and Åbo Akademi have received the certification in recent years. The EcoCompass environmental management system includes goals and measures to reduce environmental impacts and is based on the principle of continuous improvement. The environmental program of an EcoCompass-certified organisation is updated annually, and goals are reset at least every three years.

Comprehensive environmental impact calculations for the entire museum sector have not been conducted, although several individual museums have assessed their carbon footprints. Environmental impacts in museums are caused by factors such as buildings, audience and staff travel, transportation of works, and exhibition construction. The energy use of buildings contributes significantly to the carbon footprint, as the preservation of museum collections requires climate-controlled specialised spaces. Reducing emissions is often hindered by museums’ limited ability to influence the energy efficiency of the buildings they use, as museums rarely own the buildings.

In 2008, the Finnish Museums Association established a sustainable development working group composed of board members and sustainability experts. The working group published the KEKE – Museot ja kestävän kehitys (Museums and Sustainable Development) guide in 2010, summarising the relationship between museum operations and sustainable development: “Consuming culture is sustainable development, and sustainability is the core value of museums. However, museums are energy-intensive and aim for continuous collection growth, striving to attract as many visitors as possible to see temporary exhibitions – museums have many opportunities and many challenges in sustainability.“

In 2020, the Finnish Museums Association established a new sustainable development working group, which prepared the association’s first sustainable development action plan and assessed its own carbon footprint. The association organised a seven-month training program, Sanoista ekotekoihin (From Words to Eco-Actions), for its members in 2020 and 2021, with 70 participants from 40 different museum organisations. Since then, the association has annually organised separate sustainable development training or included sustainable development as part of more general training. The association also keeps the sustainability theme prominent in its communications.

The Museum Sector is Committent to Sustainability

In 2023, the Finnish Museums Association conducted a survey to get an overall picture of the sustainability attitudes and activities of Finnish professional museums. What do museums think about environmental sustainability – how do they perceive their role, and what practical sustainability measures have already been taken? According to the responses, the significance of sustainability in museum operations is high: nearly 55% of respondents stated that environmental sustainability is among their priorities both strategically and in concrete actions. Most respondents also believed that museums should be pioneers and be prepared to make difficult decisions to improve their impact on the environment.

The main challenges in promoting environmental sustainability relate to energy solutions in museum facilities and the lack of the staff’s time. Promoting environmental responsibility is considered to require a lot of effort and exploring solutions, which staff do not have the time to do, even if they want to. The benefits of promoting environmental sustainability were identified as positive visibility, savings and general societal involvement, described for example as an opportunity to influence the state of the environment, set an example and raise environmental awareness in society. According to the respondent museums, the promotion of sustainability would be supported by access to reliable information, appropriate guidance for museums, time for learning and the support of the museum owner for the environmental actions.

Museums have taken various measures to promote environmental sustainability. There were 53 respondent museums, and of these, 50 museums have promoted material recycling, 41 museums have taken measures to improve the energy efficiency of their facilities, 39 museums pay attention to the environmental impacts of procurement, 31 museums have addressed environmental issues in public engagement activities such as workshops, lectures, and guided tours, 30 museums have invested in increasing expertise related to environmental sustainability, 29 museums have addressed environmental issues in exhibition content, 15 museums have a working group focused on sustainability, 10 museums have an environmental certificate or program, and nine museums have calculated their carbon footprint either fully or partially.

The Green Handprint is the Finnish National Gallery’s environmental program, where sustainable development and the circular economy become a permanent part of the museum’s operations. Since 2020, the Green Handprint has been part of the organisation’s strategy, and the National Gallery aims for carbon neutrality by 2035. Staff activity in developing more ecologically sustainable operating models has played a significant role in the National Gallery’s sustainability work.

The Green Handprint workshop model launched by the Finnish National Gallery has been actively used in developing the ecological sustainability of Finnish museums. In Green Handprint workshops, sustainable development targets are brainstormed, and an environmental work plan is created for the museum based on these ideas. The model’s strength is that it leads to practical actions within the museum community. Between 2019 and 2022, the National Gallery introduced the Green Handprint workshop model to approximately 2,600 museum professionals in Finland and abroad.

In the Varsinais-Suomen museoiden ilmastolupaus (Climate Promise of Museums in Southwest Finland) project, 13 museums in Southwest Finland developed their operations and critically examined their operational environment from an ecological sustainability perspective between 2022 and 2023. The project was funded by the Finnish Heritage Agency. As a result of the project, museums adopted new, more ecologically sustainable practices and shared knowledge and operational models not only with the participating museums but also for broader use.

In the project, museums shared their expertise with each other, worked towards a common goal, and increased the knowledge and ability of local residents to act amidst the climate crisis and minimise its negative impacts. The project highlighted the importance of responding to the climate crisis and biodiversity loss and reinforced the message that the museum sector is continuously working on these issues.