Simpson, Nicholas; Orr, Scott; Sabour, Salma; Clarke, Joanne; Ishizawa, Maya; Feener, Michael; Ballard, Christopher; + view all Simpson, Nicholas; Orr, Scott; Sabour, Salma; Clarke, Joanne; Ishizawa, Maya; Feener, Michael; Ballard, Christopher; Mascarenhas, Poonam Verma; Pinho, Patricia; Bosson, Jean-Baptiste; Morrison, Tiffany; Zvobogo, Luckson; - view fewer (2022) ICSM CHC White Paper II: Impacts, vulnerability, and understanding risks of climate change for culture and heritage: Contribution of Impacts Group II to the International CoSponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change. ICOMOS & ICSM CHC: Paris, France.

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Abstract

Climate change is already impacting multiple types of heritage across all regions of the world. Future climate change poses increased risks to heritage globally, including losses and damages to heritage of current and future generations and particularly severe impacts on the intangible cultural heritage of Indigenous communities. Climate change impacts on heritage are not being studied consistently nor systematically, which is reflected in heritage coverage in IPCC assessments and special reports. There is a global imbalance in the number of publications assessing the impact of climate change on heritage between different regions. Regional, national and sub-national disparities are also observed (example of Australia East vs. West). As a result, it is difficult to know if what we know about the impact of climate change on heritage is just a reflection of where the science is funded rather than where or when heritage is being affected by climate change. Impacts of climate change on the broader economic benefits (besides tourism), and social and cultural value of heritage are neither investigated nor reviewed globally and rarely explored regionally or locally. Disparities in climate change / heritage publications appear to be determined by research funding, income inequality (within and between countries), colonial legacy (research ties and relationships between former colonies and colonising countries), legal systems of heritage protection (imbalance between natural and cultural heritage depending on the country/region), local vs. international interest in heritage, the language of publication (focus on English excluding other significant scientific languages such as French, Spanish, or Japanese). Improvement of data reliability and resolution allows for more nuanced reconstructions of impacts of past climatic events, facilitating historically important factors of societal adaptation processes proportional to those changes. Yet they do not provide straightforward solutions for contemporary anthropogenic climate change as the scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Alignment of climate change risk terms may facilitate collaboration between climate science and heritage research fields and enhance the likelihood of uptake by large climate change assessments like the IPCC. Innovative methods, especially those which are ideal for assessing social and cultural vulnerability, are needed to integrate the value of intangible cultural heritage with assessments of climate change risk. There is opportunity for climate change / heritage research to embrace transformational, inter- and transdisciplinary, and decolonial principles to address a range of the research and practice challenges as the field matures.

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