Void Studios took part in the UNFCCC SB64, held at the World Conference Centre Bonn from 8 to 18 June. SB64 brings together the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA). These two technical bodies meet twice yearly, in June and again in November or December, alongside sessions of the Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement governing bodies.
Within this session, Void Studios supported the Culture Global Stocktake for Climate Action, produced by the Entertainment + Culture Pavilion. The Stocktake makes the evidentiary case for culture’s role in climate action, not as a communications device or a soft complement to mitigation and adaptation, but as a determinant of how communities relate to land, material, and resource use over time. Our contribution draws on our research into vernacular construction, craft traditions, and the cultural knowledge embedded in place-based building practice: work that treats cultural continuity and ecological outcome as, more often than not, the same question addressed from different disciplines. Supporting the Stocktake reflects our view that culture cannot remain a peripheral reference in climate policy. It belongs in the substance of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), not appended to them as context.
This is a procedural argument as much as a cultural one. NDCs and NAPs are the instruments through which international climate commitments become national policy, and the methodologies agreed at sessions like SB64 shape what those instruments can formally recognise. Culture’s absence from that architecture is not accidental. It reflects how reporting frameworks were originally built around measurable emissions and adaptation metrics, categories that culture does not easily fit. The Culture Global Stocktake makes the case for closing that gap, and our contribution focuses specifically on the evidence connecting cultural practice to material and ecological outcomes, the same territory our architectural research already occupies.
Our presence at SB64 continues a pattern of engagement with international climate policy that runs alongside our project work, not apart from it. Research and design inform one another in both directions: the practice’s work on vernacular craft and material culture shapes the positions we bring into a negotiating room, and the arguments tested there sharpen how we think about cultural continuity within our own commissions. Attending SB64 is one way of keeping that exchange alive, rather than treating research and policy engagement as separate strands of the practice’s work.