Climate change is driving systems toward tipping points that require urgent action, and the cost of inaction far outweighs the cost of action. Yet the case cannot be made in the language of economics alone. Technocratic solutions cannot make a different future feel possible, desirable or worth its cost.

That is what arts and culture can do. From visual arts to music and design, they can become the social infrastructure of a just transition: how societies imagine alternative futures, build the legitimacy to pursue them, and hold together as change happens. Yet culture is still treated as peripheral to the economy: a cost to be cut rather than a precondition for transformation.

Many creatives and cultural communities are already showing the way on how arts and culture are essential for climate transition. This paper sets out four shifts that place culture at the centre of a new economy:

1. imagining a new direction for economic growth. Arts and culture make alternative futures thinkable,
   desirable and politically durable
2. working with communities, not at them 
3. activating arts and cultural institutions and coalitions as essential public infrastructure
4. governing for a creative, sustainable transition.