ID: 1870
Presenting Author: Scott Allan Orr
Session: 606 - Climate change impact assessments for cultural heritage: bridging informational gaps
Status: pending
A profile approach for climate change risks for heritage places is developed and correlated with environmental impacts. They enable risk to be contextualised at different scales.
Identifying climate change risks for heritage places is often done through hazard analysis or with heritage-specific indicators. A key challenge for the latter is stringent data requirements; for example, calculating humidity fluctuations for museum collections ideally require hourly time series or or the input of multiple variables, such as wind speed and rainfall intensity. These approaches result in single risk or hazard assessment, or very coarse geospatial assessment, ignoring their often compound and localised nature. This research develops a ‘profile’ of climate change for complex heritage places, representing a broad range of types of risk. Taking inspiration from other sectors, such as indicators developed for biodiversity and ecosystems, the criteria for profile components is: a) that they should be comprehensive of different types of environmental phenomena (averages, extremes, and seasonality); and b) determined from pre-calculated and/or aggregated measurements and projections, such as monthly averages and open-source data repositories. The profile components are correlated with over 25 established environmental impact indicators for heritage, such as those for archaeological resources and intangible heritage. The ‘profile’ approach is underpinned by global gridded data, meaning that it can be used to contextualise risk for a specific place at different scales (regional, administrative, global, etc.) and also identify climate change ‘blind spots’ by identifying emerging or future climate change challenges.
Dr Orr is an Associate Professor at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, where he leads the Heritage, Environmental Risk, and Data Analytics (HERADA) Research Group
Coauthor 1: Helen Thomas