Community-based and data-driven resilience strategies for coastal cultural landscapes: The RescueME project.

Cultural landscapes are shaped by both natural and human factors and hold cultural significance for the communities that inhabit them. The RescueME project is creating a Resilient Cultural Landscape approach, which integrates past knowledge to shape the future by linking culture with nature and community through a socioecological perspective. The objective is to develop, test, and demonstrate the effectiveness of an actionable framework based on this approach, complemented by data, models, methods, and tools to protect European cultural landscapes from the climate change and other stressors.

RescueME boosts cultural landscape resilience with participatory, simulation-based, and indicator-based methods. It aids communities in tackling immediate issues through incremental actions and long-term changes through transformative strategies, combining Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation. A serious gaming approach complemented by a decision support system will facilitate resilience strategy co-development and co-evaluation, leveraging gamification elements and advanced technologies – like AR applications and AI-based data analyses – to engage stakeholders and raise awareness about resilience in cultural landscapes. Everything will be co-created in 5 Resilient Landscapes Laboratories (R-Labs), ensuring that local conditions, available technologies, and the needs of end-users drive the development and implementation of resilience strategies. This approach seeks to protect cultural landscapes while supporting the transition toward a green society and economy. RescueME calls for broadening the scope, triggering action, mobilizing resources, engaging actors, and facilitating decision-making and implementation of co-created, just resilience solutions.

This contribution will introduce the project and its outputs, highlighting their application and impact at the R-Labs.