The Museum of Open Windows - Sensing Climate Change: A Field Guide

Join us on a guided walk of your local area. Open a window into your surroundings, to help build a living picture of the different ways climate change is affecting us all.

This part of the walk starts on your doorstep. Look for things that have grown and things that have been built and study the relationship between the two. Search for lichen – a bioindicator species – and discover hidden meanings in the names of places.

For this part of the walk you will need to be in an open green space, like a park or a field. Observe a water droplet on its journey from ice cap to ocean. Tune your senses to help detect anthropogenic noise pollution. Learn about how desynchronisation threatens the dance of the bees.

Walk to a nearby patch of woodland or cluster of trees for this part of the field guide. Get up close to the wealth of life nurtured by a single tree and learn about mysterious underground communication systems used by forests. Find more nitrogen sensitive lichens and compare them to those you found near your house. Learn how alluring and fatal discarded litter can be to wildlife.

Now it’s time to start walking back home. What an adventure! Great work. You have opened up your senses to signs of climate change in the world around you.

Sharing information and resources is crucial in the global fight against climate change, the biggest challenge in the history of mankind. Share your new local climate knowledge – and this field guide – with a friend and talk to them about ways you can protect and improve your local environment.

Action from everyday people like you can inspire governments and big organisations to make the major changes that are needed to limit the impacts of climate change.