A Decision Support System for Enhancing the Climate Resilience ofEurope’s Cultural Landscapes: Insights from the RescueME Project

Europe’s Coastal Cultural Landscapes (CCLs) are living socio‑ecological systems where cultural values, community identity, and ecosystem services interact dynamically. Increasingly affected by climate change, natural hazards, and socio‑economic pressures, these landscapes require decision‑making tools capable of integrating their complexity while supporting transformative and place‑based adaptation. The RescueME project addresses this need by co‑developing strategies that combine scientific evidence, historical identity, community knowledge, and environmental functionalities. Five Resilience Labs (R-labs) in Crete, Neuwerk, Cinque Terre, Valencia, and Zadar ensure that solutions respond to diverse cultural, ecological, and technological contexts.
Central to the project is the Resilient Heritage Landscape approach, which positions ecosystem services, community capitals, and cultural value as the baseline for understanding resilience challenges and opportunities. Building on this foundation, the project has developed a structured methodology that gathers climate impact assessments, resilience indicators, and a comprehensive repository of climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction measures organized under the IPCC framework. This methodology adopts an incremental logic, offering different levels of decision support depending on information availability and user needs.
This approach is being operationalized in a Incremental Spatial Decision Support System (ISDSS), a tool designed to help users create, refine, and monitor transformational resilience pathways. The ISDSS enables users to move from early‑stage priorisitation to advanced analysis, connecting
landscape typologies with targeted adaptation options and guiding the quantitative exploration of alternative strategies. At higher analytical levels, the system links adaptation measures with indicator‑based impact assesment and posterior monitoring. This dynamic monitoring capability strengthens iterative learning and ensures taht pathways remain adaptive.
By combining ecosystem‑service thinking, cultural value assessment, community‑driven insights, and data‑driven modelling, RescueME advances a scalable and participatory approach to safeguarding Europe’s cultural landscapes. The ISDSS empowers cultural landscapes to co‑create pathways tailored to their unique contexts, supporting long‑term resilience in a rapidly changing environment.