Preservation Of Cultural Heritage And Resources Threatened By Climate Change

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.

Reprint of articles from special issue published online in open access journal Geosciences (ISSN 2076-3263).

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.

Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage examines the challenges that environmental change, both sudden and long-term, poses to the preservation of cultural material. Acknowledging the diversity of human cultural heritage across collecting institutions, heritage sites and communities, the book highlights how, in Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the quest to preserve such precious knowledge relies on records and narratives being available to inform decisions now and into the future. Bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders who have an interest in - and responsibility for - the care of cultural heritage material and places of cultural heritage value, the book explores their thinking on and actions in relation to issues of climate change and environmental risk. Sloggett and Scott highlight the stakeholders' shared interest in drawing on their expertise to meet the challenges that environmental change brings to the future of our cultural heritage and our cultural identity. Based on the understanding that this global challenge requires local, national and international co‐operation, the book also considers how local knowledge can have international application. Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage will be of interest to those engaged in the study of heritage, conservation, archaeology, archives, anthropology, climate change and the environment. It will also be useful to practitioners and others attempting to understand the effect of environmental change on cultural heritage around the globe.

The contributions collected in this volume stem from an international conference entitled Climate Change as a Threat to Peace: Impacts on Cultural Heritage and Cultural Diversity, hosted by the German Commission for UNESCO and the UNESCO Chair in International Relations at the Technische Universiteat Dresden.

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.

Heritage occupies a privileged position within the built environment. Most municipalities in the United States, and nearly all countries around the world, have laws and policies to preserve heritage in situ, seeking to protect places from physical loss and the forces of change. That privilege, however, is increasingly being unsettled by the legacies of racial, economic, and social injustice in both the built environment and historic preservation policy, and by the compounding climate crisis. Though many heritage projects and practitioners are confronting injustice and climate in innovative ways, systemic change requires looking beyond the formal and material dimensions of place and to the processes and outcomes of preservation policy--operationalized through laws and guidelines, regulatory processes, and institutions--across time and socio-geographic scales, and in relation to the publics they are intended to serve. This third volume in the Issues in Preservation Policy series examines historic preservation as an enterprise of ideas, methods, institutions, and practices that must reorient toward a new horizon, one in which equity and sustainability become critical guideposts for policy evolution.