Climate Change, Resilience and Cultural Heritage

In the third decade of the 21st century, one of the most debatable issues that one can think of concerning any sustainability and resilience scenarios of management and development is the need to plan comprehensively feasible as much as possible, particularly when it comes to our shared global goals such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or climate resilience. Nevertheless, such a practical concept of comprehensiveness has yet to be entertained thoroughly regarding cultural heritage and its related fields. That is the missing common ground with which the author attempts to build up this book. This chapter, as an introduction, briefly informs the readers about the author’s research background behind the debates of the book, the structure of research, the scope and highlights of book chapters, and in overall, what readers should expect to gain from each chapter toward the end of the book.

By considering climate change as a disaster risk driver, this chapter explores cultural heritage’s complex interrelationship with climate change, retracing such synergies within significant international documents, roadmaps, and scholarly debates at the international level. It informs the readers about climate change, its challenges, and its effects on cultural heritage, considering climate science and heritage fields. The chapter argues for a possible role of heritage in response to climate change. In specific, it critically reviews significant existing international policy documents such as the 2015 UN Paris Agreement, the 2017 UNESCO Strategy for Action on Climate Change (SACC), the 2019 European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage (EFACH), and the 2020 ICOMOS Resolution 20GA/15-Cultural Heritage and the Climate Emergency by which it provides us a better understanding of the matter in hand while reflecting on constructive ways to shift our shared mission to action by looking into a few transformative initiatives.

This chapter goes further in the debates on climate change and cultural heritage by diagnostically delving into the existing critical gaps in international documents and scholarly debates and it provides a critical re-evaluation of a few practical considerations. Starting from UNESCO and ICOMOS at the international level and arriving at Europe, it provides readers with a clearer image of the binary between climate change debates in the heritage framework and heritage debates in the climate change framework. Further, exploring more profoundly the lack of a comprehensive vision of climate and environmental change-related issues regarding cultural heritage, this chapter investigates four categories of institutional/organizational/managerial, technical/technological, socio-cultural, and financial gaps. Nevertheless, reflecting on those gaps, the last section of this chapter explores a few constructive recommendatory encounters by which the attempt is to build a set of reflections on the ways of integrating heritage into climate change policy frameworks while minding the incorporation of climate change challenges in heritage policies and strategies at all levels, from strengthening the connection between heritage and climate science, to leveraging cultural dimension of climate change, and practical recommendations for bridging its associated limits in policies and practices.

One step forward from chapter three, this chapter focuses on cultural heritage and climate change impact by investigating meaningful gaps that hide failures and opportunities to achieve success in tackling the impact of climate change on cultural heritage on diverse scales. Like the previous chapter, it tracks the gaps in four categories. However, more predominantly, significant institutional/organizational/managerial and technical gaps are under investigation, concentrating on the climate change debates in the heritage framework. In particular, this chapter delves into the notion of adaptation to climate change, looking into the typologies of its opportunities, constraints, and limits. At the same time, the section dedicated to practical considerations informs us about the way to move forward, from strengthening systemic, swifter, and faster adaptation actions to improving scientific and narrative-based knowledge, managing uncertainties, and having effective integration of indigenous and local knowledge systems. The final section of this chapter provides us with a rational understanding of the barriers in the adaptation process. Considering the characteristics of climate adaptation barriers regarding cultural heritage, this section explores the principles of effective adaptation strategies.

This chapter investigates the contemporary definitions of resilience and resilience thinking since 1973. Similar to other chapters, it looks into those definitions and their evolutions at international and European levels, as well as within scholarly debates in various fields regarding the term. Having synthetically compared and analyzed the existing and up-to-date definitions of resilience from different fields, this chapter raises awareness about the need for more up-to-date emergent ideas in the definition of resilience—positive adaptability and transformability—alongside more traditional ones in heritage protection conservation and management. Exploring international frameworks such as the 2012 Venice Declaration on Building Resilience at the Local Level towards Protected Cultural Heritage and Climate Change Adaptation Strategies, and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction frameworks like Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, this chapter, in particular, advocates for considering heritage-at-risk framework approach to resilience thinking, from having curative interventions to preventive measures, as well as detailing out the ways toward the recognition of pro-active pre-disaster preventive measures and the proactive role of heritage in disaster risk reduction.

This chapter expands the preceding discussions by exploring the (disaster) risk management debates. It observes the actual challenges toward resilient cultural heritage and communities in both heritage and (disaster) risk management fields in order to explore the global landscape of risk by instrumentalizing the potential or advances mainly from the (disaster) risk management field in the heritage field. By looking into the paradigm shift toward the dynamic nature of systemic risk, particularly for cultural heritage, this chapter opens possible ways of managing such systemic risk within strengthening risk governance for an integrated framework of effective cultural heritage disaster risk management. To do so, it explores some of the most significant challenges in building resilient cultural heritage by risk governance/management and, thus, more precisely, places them in other categories of gaps already defined in the previous chapters. And, it concludes with a handful of practical considerations and reflections in which the ways to foster risk-informed decision-making, risk prevention/reduction, and emergency response/recovery actions via systematic integration of culture in a broader risk management framework are being entertained toward oping a window for strong policy, regulatory framework, and governance in the heritage sector.

The last chapter of this book attempts to sum up the debates of the previous chapters by advocating for a new definition of resilience for the heritage field, reaching out to the social and environmental domains. This chapter also explores some of the fresh ideas being explored in the field of economics, in particular, by adopting and rephrasing the definition of regional economic resilience, the author provokes a regenerative process of the heritage system, debating on the parameters of its co-evolution. Finally, the author introduces Preventive and Planned Conservation as an innovative strategy for the management of such a heritage system.