At International Curators Forum (ICF), we recognise that the climate emergency represents one of the most significant challenges facing society today. This urgent issue demands attention and action, as it affects communities, economies and the environment on a global scale. The window for action is rapidly closing and we are already seeing the impacts through devastating droughts, storms, floods and forest fires across the world. Related crises include collapsing biodiversity, dangerous levels of air pollution and plastic contamination in our rivers and oceans. Without urgent collective action, these problems will rapidly escalate.
Arts organisations – particularly in the Global North – have a disproportionately large impact on the environment, mainly due to substantial amounts of international travel, art shipping, waste production and the use of energy and materials. We believe that arts organisations have a responsibility to address and mitigate these impacts and utilise their public platforms and cultural influence to create a substantial space for critical reflection, research, dialogue, experimentation and exchange between artists, curators and the public, grounded in climate justice.
We need to act immediately to reduce the industry’s impact on the environment. As a sector, we have an opportunity to use our public platforms and cultural influence to set a positive example, encouraging and supporting others to take action.
At ICF, we pledge to continually examine our operations and become more adaptive, responsible in order to reduce our impact on the environment. As a non-building based organisation, we identify our biggest sources of carbon emissions to be our travel, transportation, printing and waste produced through the creation of artworks and exhibitions.
We acknowledge our responsibility and pledge to mitigate our environmental impacts and work towards a more sustainable future. We have committed to addressing these impacts by the following actions:
- Staff and Participants are asked to utilise public transport as much as possible and we reduce the number of trips taken by encouraging group travel, bulk transport etc;
- Allowing team members to work from home when not delivering on-site programming for public events, or development work like site visits, exhibition installation / deinstallation and invigilation;
- Encouraging team members and trustees to join meetings via conferencing systems such as Zoom and Teams;
- Keeping printing and the purchase of office supplies to an agreed minimum, prioritising digital communication / document The organisation has met its commitment to implement paperless Board meetings, digital surveys and press releases;
- While we still print exhibition leaflets for accessibility and legacy reasons, we now also make these available online / in digital format and pursue the use of more sustainable papers and inks for these outputs;
- Utilising streamlined data collection and reporting methods for the environmental impact of our work across our day-to-day operations for staff and projects for better efficiency and responsiveness. This data is be held in our centralised database;
- Including clauses on environmental responsibility in our participant and partner agreements;
- Upholding a ban on single use plastics for all internal events/meetings and extend this to all public programming presented with partners whenever possible;
- Implementing recommendations made by our 2025/6 Advisory Group for improved approaches to our environmental actions;
- Implement learnings gained and commitments made by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director and Producer: Network Engagement who undertook Carbon Literacy Training for Museums training in 2025/6;
- Maintaining a Green Team in the organisation which undertakes research / training across our annual target areas.
In addition to the direct actions we are taking, we also aim to work in partnership with our artists, collaborators and suppliers to support, share knowledge and spark discussion to instigate action throughout our network.
You can request our full environmental policy by emailing info@internationalcuratorsforum.org or using the Contact Us page on our website. While we actively work to uphold our environmental responsibilities, we recognise that there is always more to be done and steps that we can take that we might not yet be aware of. We welcome feedback and insight from artists, practitioners, audiences and stakeholders on this environmental statement, our targets, and our action plans.
David A. Bailey, Artistic Director
April 2026