The Natural History Museum in London has announced a major transformation program that it says will be “a step change from a catalog of natural history to a catalyst for change” in response to the climate emergency.
The scheme to refurbish the museum’s celebrated Victorian building and develop a new research and storage facility will build on its aim to turn visitors into “advocates for the planet”, it said on Thursday..
Four existing galleries will be renovated, including its hugely popular dinosaur gallery, while the museum plans to reopen two long-closed exhibition spaces, one of which, the Old General Herbarium, has not been accessible to the public since 1948.
One of them will house a new permanent exhibit that the museum’s director, Doug Gurr, said will include the most explicit climate messages it has ever presented. The exhibition, Fixing Our Broken Planet, will have the express purpose of “pushing” visitors to change their behaviour, he said.
The new exhibition spaces will be freed up by the creation of a purpose-built storage, research and digitization center at Thames Valley Science Park near Reading, where more than a third of the museum’s enormous natural history collection will be moved from its “unsuitable, unsustainable” current home.
The museum said this was “so we can take better care of it and share its data more easily with scientists around the world who are finding solutions to problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and food security.”
Until recently, Gurr told the Guardian, the museum saw itself as a “passive observer … our job was to collect, to preserve, to research, to exhibit”.
“[Then] we stepped back a little bit and said, ‘Well, wait, if your subject is planet Earth and it’s under so much threat, you have to do something about it. If you want the sports analogy: how do you get off the sidelines and onto the field?”
In 2020, the museum declared a planetary emergency, and Gurr said the redevelopment was part of his ongoing response. “The best contribution we can make is to create what we call ‘advocates for the planet’. And what that really means is: how do you inspire people at scale to care about nature and to care enough to want to do something about it?
“Of course we still want people to have a brilliant, fun family day out. But if you can come out of it being a little more interested in nature and a little more aware of some of the challenges, you’re a little more likely to want to do something about it.”
The refurbishment of the South Kensington site will be completed in time for the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2031. Most of the funding will come from the government, which already committed more than £200m to the new collections and research centre, while a further £155m will fund a museum-led program to digitize natural science collections in the UK. In addition, the museum has announced plans to raise £150m from philanthropic and commercial sponsors.
Gurr said the museum is happy to “talk to everybody” about possible sources of sponsorship, but will not accept donations from companies it considers unacceptable partners based on their climate record. “We are very, very clear that when we talk to us [a potential sponsor]we are going to look at the actual behavior against the statements,” he said.
Gurr said the museum has turned down “significant” sums in the past “where we just felt it wouldn’t be appropriate to accept at this stage because we’re well aware that you can’t go around asking people to change behavior and save the planet if you are hypocritical in some of the gifts you accept”.
He would not be drawn to the position taken by other institutions such as the Science Museum and the British Museumboth of which have highly controversial funding relationships with energy companies, but he said: “It is factual that we have not accepted any funding from fossil fuel companies.”
The museum has recently redeveloped its outdoor space two new gardens focuses on evolution and biodiversity, and Gurr said he hopes to expand his education programwhich encourages schools to exploit their own outdoor space and improve their climate and nature education.
