People's Emergency Briefing screening: Panel discussion at WRAP Brighton
Yesterday at WRAP Brighton we were able to show as a part of the 'Tide & Place' exhibition the People's Emergecny Briefing film. This is a 50-minute documentary film that explains the real-world impacts of the climate and nature crisis in the UK. In November 2025, the National Emergency Briefing brought together leading experts to present the latest evidence on the climate and nature crisis to politicians and other influential people in Westminster. That evidence is now on the public record.
The Issues: Outlines how environmental and climate breakdown affects everyday British life, including public health, food security, the economy, and national security.
Solutions: Explores practical, positive, and credible actions society can take.
What followed the People's Emergency Briefing film was a panel discussion and sharing of insights and refletions. I made a contribution as a panel member and I've attached below:
Thank you. I want to respond to the film from the perspective of an artist, an art educator and someone who has been thinking quite a lot about what it means to learn through being in a place. I've particularly been thinking about this from the how can we help young people perspective as an educator. And I would like to use the work here (at WRAP) as part of a group of creatives collaborating with the charity Sussex Bay.
One of the things I take from the film is the enormous scale and complexity of the challenges we are facing. Climate change, biodiversity loss, food systems, energy, economics, health, politics – these are interconnected systems, and they can very quickly become overwhelming. And I think that presents a particular challenge for education and young people. How do we enable young people to engage seriously with these issues without simply giving them more information, more anxiety, or a sense that the problems are so large that there is nothing they can do?
For me, contemporary art offers one possible way into that question. I don't mean art as a way of illustrating climate change, or making another poster telling us that we need to save the planet. I am interested in art as a way of paying attention, asking questions, making relationships visible, and experiencing the world differently.
My own practice has increasingly centred on walking as a way of doing that. I have been developing what I call Walking Pedagogy – thinking about walking not simply as a way of getting from one place to another, or as an outdoor activity, but as a method of knowing. When we walk, we encounter a place at a particular pace. We notice things that we might normally pass by. We become aware of sound, temperature, surfaces, materials, people, plants, animals, buildings, histories and changes.
And importantly, we don't encounter these things in isolation.
A walk can begin to reveal relationships. You might follow water through a landscape and suddenly be thinking about drainage, flooding, agriculture, industry, settlement and the sea. You might notice a particular tree and begin thinking about biodiversity, shade, heat, air quality, land ownership and urban planning. You might walk along a coastline and discover that what looks like a beautiful landscape is also a site of industry, extraction, tourism, erosion, pollution, labour and ecological change.
So the walk becomes a form of research.
And that is something I explored through my recent work at Tide & Place at WRAP.
The work brought together walking, field recording, photography, drawing and sound as ways of encountering the Sussex landscape and the marine environment. Rather than starting with a predetermined environmental message, I was interested in starting with the place itself: walking, listening, noticing and recording. That led to Sussex Bay: Reverberation, for example, which developed through field recording from the South Downs and the River Adur towards the coast and Sussex Bay. The sound work isn't trying to explain the ecology of the area. Instead, it asks us to spend time listening to it.
And I think there is something important in that distinction.
Before we ask young people to solve a problem, perhaps we need to give them opportunities to encounter it.
To experience where they are.
To develop a relationship with a place.
To become curious about it.
And then to ask questions.
That seems particularly relevant to art and design education. Because one of the strengths of our subject is that we don't always have to begin with an answer. We can begin with an observation, a material, a sound, a movement, a question or an encounter.
We can say to a young person:
Go outside. Walk for ten minutes. Don't take a photograph of something because you think it is beautiful. Find something you normally don't notice.
Or:
Listen to this place for five minutes. What can you hear? What can't you hear?
Or:
Follow the water. Where does it go?
Or:
Find something made by humans and something not made by humans. What relationships do they have?
Or:
What evidence can you find that this place has changed?
These are very simple propositions, but they can become quite sophisticated forms of enquiry.
And they can lead anywhere.
A young person might make a drawing. Another might make a sound recording. Someone else might make a sculpture from discarded materials. Someone might make a film, a map, a performance or a photographic series. Another might decide that they need to find out about the history of the site, or talk to somebody who has lived there for 50 years. That is where I think contemporary art can make a particular contribution to climate and sustainability education.
It doesn't necessarily tell a young person what to think. It gives them ways of finding things out. And I think that distinction is important. We have talked about climate education sometimes as if the task is to transfer a body of knowledge from the expert to the pupil. Of course, knowledge matters enormously. We need the science. We need geography. We need history. We need economics.
But we also need embodied, sensory and situated forms of knowledge.
What does climate change mean here?
What does biodiversity loss look like here?
What does flooding sound like?
What materials are present in our everyday lives?
Where did they come from?
Where will they go?
Who benefits from this landscape?
Who has shaped it?
Who is missing from its history?
And what might it become?
These are questions that art and design can open up. And this is where I think the local becomes really important.
We don't necessarily need to take young people somewhere exotic to teach them about ecological change. We have extraordinary environments immediately around us in Sussex.
The South Downs.
The River Adur.
The Ouse.
The coastline.
Shoreham Port.
The urban environment of Brighton and Hove.
And, actually, the school grounds themselves. A school is already an ecological site. There is water moving through it. There are plants and insects. There are materials, energy systems, food systems, waste systems. There are patterns of heat and shade. There is a history beneath the buildings.
So perhaps one response to the enormous scale of the climate crisis is to slow down and become attentive to the place where we are.
That connects strongly with my Walking Pedagogy research.
I'm interested in the idea that walking can be lived, contextual, creative, imaginative, personal and embodied. It isn't just a method for delivering curriculum content. It can change the relationship between the learner, the teacher and the place in which learning happens.
And I think pace matters. We're often asking young people to process enormous amounts of information at enormous speed. Walking does almost the opposite. It slows things down. It creates time for uncertainty. It allows something unexpected to happen.
And contemporary art can work in a similar way. It can interrupt our usual ways of seeing. It can make the familiar strange. It can make something invisible visible. It can ask us to stay with a question rather than immediately resolve it.
For me, that is where hope becomes interesting. When I say hope, I mean as a verb, a doing word, an action, not a wish.
I don't think hope in climate education necessarily means telling young people that everything is going to be alright.
I think hope can mean giving young people the capacity to imagine that things can be different. And then giving them the tools to investigate what that difference might look like.
So rather than:
Here is the climate crisis. Here is the correct response.
we might say:
Here is a place.
Look carefully.
What is happening?
What do you notice?
What don't you understand?
What questions does that raise?
What could be different?
And what can you make that helps somebody else see it?
That, for me, is where art & design education can become genuinely important within climate and sustainability education.
Not because art can solve the climate crisis.
It obviously can't.
But because education needs more than information.
It needs curiosity.
It needs criticality.
It needs imagination.
It needs empathy.
It needs the capacity to live with uncertainty.
And it needs ways for people to develop meaningful relationships with the places they inhabit.
So if I were to leave teachers & educators with one proposition following this film, it would be quite simple:
Start where you are.
Don't necessarily begin with the global.
Begin with the local.
Walk.
Listen.
Look.
Notice.
Ask questions.
Research.
Make.
Share.
And then ask what might change.
For me, that is the connection between Tide & Place, Walking Pedagogy and the wider challenge that the NEB presents to education.
The ecological crisis may be global, but our encounters with it are always situated somewhere.
And perhaps one of the most valuable things art & design education can do is help young people become attentive to that somewhere – to develop a relationship with it, question it, imagine its possibilities, and understand that they are not simply observers of the world, but participants within it.
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