Libraries and positive climate action: inform to transform

Libraries and positive climate action: inform to transform

Thursday 30 October 2025, 16.00 – 17.30

This session will explore global examples of how libraries are building their capacity in climate literacy and engagement with a wide range of communities.

Providing information is a vital part of libraries’ climate change work – being able to point to the latest science and the most relevant local sources of information. The ways in which libraries do this is varied and often innovative. They include workshops, discussions or practical materials to encourage recycling, reduction of energy consumption or improvements in our natural environment. This also means that librarians need new types of training and resources to help them take up these new activities.

Further details to be announced soon.

Libraries and positive climate action: read, learn, act

Thursday 11 December 2025, 16.00 – 17.30

In this session, we will explore how libraries are getting involved with citizen science and the lessons learnt in the process.

Many libraries are increasingly participating in citizen science initiatives, enabling them to become active participants in improving our knowledge about our local environments and climate impact on our lives. With a growing range of projects – from collecting data about biodiversity, water pollution, or coastal erosion, to helping with analysis and dissemination of scientific results – citizen science is helping scientists and engaging the public more deeply with emerging issues.

Further details to be announced soon.

Libraries and positive climate action: reduce, reuse, regenerate

Thursday 26 February 2026, 10.00 – 11.30

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.

Further details to be announced soon.

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 October, December and February, we will be 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 will look how libraries can build their capacity to provide information about climate change and to facilitate practical climate action. In the second webinar, we will look at how libraries can support science and how citizen science can enable users to participate in building up our collective knowledge of climate issues. And thirdly, we will explore how our economy and consumer-focused societies could 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.