Heritage Education For Climate Action

Cultural heritage is increasingly recognized for its contributions to the transition to climate action, and heritage education can play an important role in developing climate adaptation competencies. These can foster positive dialogs surrounding climate change, shift attitudes and inspire actions. However, achieving these goals requires bridging the gap between policy, practice and local capacity building, as well as integrating a multi- and transdisciplinary approach into traditional higher education curricula and models. Bringing together knowledge, practice and experiences from different disciplinary silos, this book provides a wide set of innovative teaching and learning methods, tools and pedagogical models that can be adapted to heritage education in order to address climate issues. Organized into four parts, Heritage Education for Climate Action covers a wide array of international experiences, real-life cases and practices, focusing on heritage and resilience building, vulnerability and risk assessment, climate change adaptation, mitigation and policymaking. This book is therefore a source of suggestions and ideas for scholars, educators and professionals who want to develop future climate leadership and contribute to the transition of heritage education toward sustainable development and climate action.

This collection deals with the impacts of climate change, focusing on urban regions and heritage-related scenarios. It assesses the effects of climate change on our cultural and natural heritage, disaster management, adaptation to climate change, and sustainability in building and urban planning. Climate change concerns our cultural and natural heritage, so it is crucial that we address this issue with regard to all of its social, physical and cultural consequences. Far-reaching actions are needed to adapt the natural and historic environment to make it more resilient to climate change and to limit further damage.

Natural World Heritage sites, such as the Serengeti, or Natural and Cultural Heritage sites, such as the Historic Centre of Rome, have the common feature of being a treasured resource of global importance. The 1121 properties on the World Heritage (WH) list have permanent recognized value for humankind. Most of those >1000 locations are at some risk from changes in climate. Globally, scholars and managers seek to understand current and future climatic stresses, mitigation and adaptation opportunities. There is a strong need for the “So What?” in World Heritage studies. The invited papers in this volume address natural, cultural and mixed WH sites, and each offers a fresh perspective on assessing the degree of risk from changing climate and guidance on acting to mitigate and adapt to climate changes to provide new awareness and tools to improve their state of conservation for the future.

Climate change is a critical issue for heritage studies. Sites, objects and ways of life all are coming under threat, requiring alternative management, or requiring specific climate change adaptation. Heritage is key to interpreting the societal significance of climate change; notions (and images) of the past are crucial to our understanding of the present, and are used to prompt actions that help society define and achieve a specific and desired future. Relatively little attention has been paid to the critical intersections between heritage and climate change. The Future of Heritage as Climates Change frames the intellectual context within which heritage and climate change can be examined, presenting cases and sub-fields in which the heritage-climate change nexus is being examined and provides synthetic analyses through five overarching themes: The heritage of change among coastal communities: liminality and the politics of engagement Dwelling materials: processes and possibilities; Environmental heritage: meanings of the past - prospects for the future; Blurring the boundaries of nature and culture: the politics of anticipation; Climate change and heritage practice: adaptation and resilience. The Future of Heritage as Climates Change provides scholars, managers, policy makers and students with a much needed examination of heritage and climate change to help make critical decisions in the next several decades.

With its wide spectrum of data, case studies, monitoring, and experimental and numerical simulation techniques, the multidisciplinary approach of material, environmental, and computer science applied to the conservation of cultural heritage offers several opportunities for the heritage science and conservation community to map and monitor state-of-the-art knowledge on natural and human-induced climate change impacts on cultural heritage—mainly constituted by the built environment—in Europe and Latin America. Geosciences’ Special Issue titled “Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Resources Threatened by Climate Change” was launched to take stock of the existing but still fragmentary knowledge on this challenge, and to enable the community to respond to the implementation of the Paris agreement. These 10 papers exploit a broad range of data derived from preventive conservation monitoring conducted indoors in museums, churches, historical buildings, or outdoors in archeological sites and city centers. Case studies presented in the papers focus on a well-assorted sample of decay phenomena occurring on heritage materials (e.g., surface recession and biomass accumulation on limestone, depositions of pollutant on marble, salt weathering on inorganic building materials, and weathering processes on mortars in many local- to regional-scale study areas in the Scandinavian Peninsula, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Italy, Greece, and Panama). Besides monitoring, the methodological approaches showcased include, but are not limited to, original material characterization, decay product characterization, and climate and numerical modelling on material components for assessing environmental impact and climate change effects.

Climate action requires deep and rapid transformations in society. However, institutions and sectors – including museums – are often unprepared for these transformations. Action is woefully insufficient to address the challenge. This Toolbox brings together information on climate change policy, sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals, and a number of approaches that museums can draw on to inform their activities. The Toolbox explores some of the ideas that were generated through the project Reimagining Museums for Climate Action, which included a design competition, exhibition, website and book. The Toolbox consists of a variety of approaches that you can pick and choose from, depending on your context, challenges, and aspirations. It is not intended to be the last word on the subject, or to be read from start to finish as a single tool: think of it as a go-to manual. Climate change is complex, and the challenges, and appropriate responses, vary from place to place, and community to community. That is why this collection is a Toolbox, rather than a tool or a toolkit. The Toolbox has been formatted to be used on a computer screen. Hyperlinks are embedded in this file, to access further information. If you do plan to print this document, please think of the environment, print only what you need, and print double-sided.

This open access book identifies various forms of heritage destruction and analyses their causes. It proposes strategies for avoiding and solving conflicts, based on integrating heritage into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It reflects on the identity-building role of heritage, on multidimensional conflicts and the destruction of heritage, and considers conflict-solving strategies and future perspectives. Furthermore, it engages theoretically and practically with the concepts of responsibility, reconciliation and sustainability, relating mainly to four Sustainable Development Goals, i.e. SDGs 4 (education), 11 (e.g. World Heritage), 13 (climate action) and 17 (partnerships for the goals). More than 160 countries have inscribed properties on the UNESCO World Heritage list since the World Heritage Convention came into force. Improvements in the implementation of the Convention, such as the Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List, have occurred, but other conflicts have not been solved. The book advocates for a balanced distribution of properties and more effective strategies to represent the global diversity of cultural and natural heritage. Furthermore it highlights the importance of heritage in identity building.