Libraries and positive climate action: reduce, reuse, regenerate

The British Library is hosting a series of webinars focused on libraries and the climate crisis. The aim of the series is to bring together international library leaders to share their different responses to the climate emergency.

With libraries representing the ultimate circular and sharing environment, this session will explore how we can contribute to and raise awareness of a wider circular economy.

We are familiar with the high level of waste created by different industries that supply us with our clothes, food, household items and other everyday products. The reuse and sharing of resources is what libraries are all about. Libraries are organisations that help people to share books, music, newspapers, video games, and increasingly other types of items such as tools or seeds. As many different industries, such as fashion or electric goods manufacturers, look how to adopt circular models that integrate re-use of materials, repairing and sharing into their processes, this session will look at how libraries can encourage circular economy developments.

This event will be live captioned.

Speakers will be announced shortly.

The session will be chaired by Maja Maricevic, Director of Science and Innovation at the British Library and responsible for the Library’s strategy, policy and partnership development across higher education and science. Maja is particularly interested in the big challenges of our time, such as the continuing digital transformation and climate change. Maja chairs the UK Green Libraries Campaign, a partnership of UK libraries working towards a better future for planet and people. Maja is an Advisory Board Member for the UK Research and Innovation programme Building a Greener Future. She is also a Board member of London’s Knowledge Quarter. She has previously worked in universities, government departments and as a professional consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Libraries and positive climate action

By their nature, libraries are both places of information and places enabling the birth of new ideas and activities. This means that libraries are ideal hubs to help us address the complex challenges of our time. In this series of events, organised by the British Library, we explore how libraries across the globe are deploying their expertise and resources to tackle the climate crisis. Libraries’ action is focused on the diverse communities on their doorstep and their experiences of climate change in their local environment. However, libraries worldwide are also collaborating and learning from each other to enable positive climate action.

In this series, we are looking at three crucial climate-focused themes, relevant both for libraries that are already active in climate initiatives, and those that are just starting to explore this area of activity. Firstly, we are looking at how libraries can build their capacity to provide information about climate change and to facilitate practical climate action. In the second webinar, we are looking at how citizen science can enable users to participate in building up our collective knowledge of climate issues. And thirdly, we are exploring how libraries can support our consumer-focused societies to adopt circular economies to use our resource more efficiently.

Our expert panellists, from different libraries across the world, will help us discover new perspectives and share practical tips and real-life experiences to broaden our knowledge and inform our future practice.

Image: from the British Library archive