A Structured Framework for Climate-Adaptive Cultural Heritage Management

This presentation outlines a multi-faceted framework for addressing climate change adaptation. The methodology is built upon key pillars, including the resilience and integrity of cultural heritage assets, responsible resource use, and effective mitigation of hazard impacts. The success of any adaptation initiative depends on a holistic evaluation that considers not only technical feasibility and cost, but also its broader societal, cultural, community, and economic impacts, including the project's carbon footprint and adherence to principles of the circular economy.
The management of cultural heritage threated by increasing climate change hazards needs a multi-criteria evaluation framework. A structured approach to decision-making ensures that all intervention strategies prioritize conservation, resilience, and long-term sustainability. Criteria and their respective measurement spaces include technical feasibility, cost (which may be incured looking towards the benefit of increasing climate resilience for culturally significant buildings and unbuilt spaces), adherence to regulatory compliance, as well as impact on society and culture. Authenticity, values, and integrity of the heritage building or unbuilt space must be kept. Thus framework emphasizes key climate-specific metrics: hazard impact mitigation, proactive adaptability (such as preventive retrofit), efficient resource use (including materials, time and workforce as they may be depicted in devices for costs calculation), minimizing carbon footprint, and aligning with the circular economy. Actually building retrofit by itself as a reuse strategy illustrates the principles of circular economy itself at its best in the built environment. Such a retrofit project must demonstrate community acceptance (for example by respecting the mental map of landmarks to be kept in case of reconstruction, following Kevin Lynch principles as well as a psychogeograhic parcours), offer educational value, and ensure positive economic impact. 
This strategic management model follows a four-level hierarchy, from the definition of the overarching mission and objectives (Level 1), over problem definition, diagnosis, and stakeholders analysis (Level 2) to defining the challenge and identifying opportunities (Level 3). The highest level of decision-making (Level 4) - implementation - involves setting evaluation criteria, criterion weighting, and decision rules to inform the final choice and design of the intervention. The outcome is an action plan comprising operational and communication (a higher level of participation) means, demonstrated in a model project aiming at long-term resilience and effective climate risk management.

An analysis of various climate change-related events (floods: Elbe/East Germany 2013, Passau 2013, Florence 1966, Bosnia Herzegovina 2025, and winter storms: Lothar 1999, and Atlantic storm in 2013) is included, detailing, along with articles and online exhibitions, for each event:

• Structures: Locations and specific areas affected, such as the Elbe and Bosna rivers, the Black Forest, inner-city forests in Karlsruhe, and the Pena Palace park in Sintra.
• Damage: The impacts range from common effects like flooding of streets, transport disruption, and damage to lower levels of buildings (incl. economic impacts and activity disruption) to specific damage like forest destruction and agricultural land saturation from freaic water.
• Intervention:
  • Short-term/Emergency: Early warning, sandbags, closing roads, removing fallen trees.
  • Long-term: Awareness campaigns, a flood museum (Passau), landscape solutions (river renaturation, changing vegetation to more storm-resilient species in affected forests)