Data-driven climate change risk assessment for heritage in England

A changing climate is impacting the resilience of the infrastructure, economy and resource use, and wellbeing that underpin society. Heritage, within the historic built environment and as archaeological sites, has an important role to play in addressing each of these aspects. Underpinning our understanding of the impacts of climate change is risk assessment.

Herein we propose to use the risk framework currently used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which identifies three components of risk: hazard - a potentially destructive physical phenomenon, exposure - the location, attributes, and value of [heritage] assets that are important to communities and that could be affected by a hazard, and vulnerability - the likelihood that assets will be affected/damaged/destroyed when exposed to a hazard. Most risk assessment to date on climate change and heritage has focused on hazard assessment, including mapping, and communicating changes in frequency of occurrence and/or severity, combined with a qualitative representation of the vulnerability, this includes Historic England's own collaboration with UK heritage partners to map the climate hazards affecting heritage.

Thus, our perception of areas that are prone to the greatest level of risk to climate change in the UK is informed by those with the most significant changes in hazards. However, this overlooks the fact only a small fraction of heritage, certain types of heritage, or heritage with significance to particular communities, may lie within these areas as identified through hazard assessment alone, or have values that are vulnerable to those hazards.

Drawing on the IPCC framework above, a more accurate understanding of climate change related risks for heritage needs to incorporate vulnerability and exposure. Due to the diversity and scale of England's rich heritage (there are about 360,000 heritage assets on the National Heritage list for England and many times that on local Historic Environment Records and existent as unlisted heritage), this requires a data-driven approach.

This project will undertake a statistical climate change risk assessment that incorporates hazard, vulnerability, and exposure for England's heritage. This project will use data-driven spatial analysis and communication to provide statistically robust climate change-heritage risk assessment that combine climatic impact drivers (hazards) with heritage vulnerability and exposure.

This will begin with a review of the relevant literature and subject expertise present in heritage organisations and a pilot project for the NHLE. The bulk of the project will be devoted to developing representations of national-scale risk and communication/dissemination outputs.

This project would identify the limitations of existing approaches within climate heritage resilience research, practice, and policy. By relating these approaches to their theoretical basis, it would identify opportunities to improve statistical approaches to climate heritage resilience, especially to align historically disparate impacts and responses more closely to climate change within material loss, social and economic contexts, and sustainable resource use.

The exploration of innovative statistical methods within the field will develop new directions for research climate heritage resilience and produce new evidence to inform policy and practice. This work will lay the foundation for robust and dynamic responses to climate change in a heritage context, which would establish the student at the front of an emerging area of the heritage sector while also equipping them with comprehensive data science skills that could be applied more widely.