ID: 1851
Presenting Author: Helen Thomas
Session: 606 - Climate change impact assessments for cultural heritage: bridging informational gaps
Status: pending
This study combines site-level attributes from over 400,000 listed heritage places into a multi-determinant, data-driven framework for climate risk assessment across heritage scales.
There are over 400,000 heritage places on the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) which range from internationally iconic monuments, such as Stonehenge and the Palace of Westminster, to parts of the everyday streetscape, such as telephone boxes and signposts. Site-level assessments cannot feasibly determine the total impact of climate change on England’s nationally listed heritage. However, landscape-level approaches for climate risk tend to only look at climate hazards, overlooking individual characteristics (such as material composition, current management and use) that are important factors in climate risk and resilience. To address this mismatch, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) risk determinants – hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and response – are combined with a data-driven approach to explore the extent that site-level aspects can be integrated into a national climate risk assessment. The paper explores how a national heritage dataset can be utilised to: identify gaps in understanding; calculate the four IPCC risk determinants; and recommend solutions to improve heritage data integration into impact assessments. This case study approach more broadly demonstrates how site-level data can be integrated into a multideterminant scalable risk assessment which is applicable across heritage typologies and management contexts.
Helen Thomas is a PhD Researcher between the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage and Historic England. She is a CCSF scholar and a Research Assistant in Heritage and Environmental Risk.
Coauthor 1: Valentina Marincioni
Coauthor 2: Kate Guest
Coauthor 3: Neil Guiden
Coauthor 4: Scott Allan Orr