Risk Management for Cultural Heritage

Climate change, combined with worldwide energy and resource deficiency problems are serious threats of our time. However, few studies are published on how climate change affects our material cultural heritage. For sustainable management of our cultural heritage, it is vital to be prepared on how the future changing climate will influence the indoor climates in buildings. Cultural heritage is a non-renewable resource of intrinsic importance to our identity: therefore, there is a need to develop more effective and efficient preservation, adaptation and mitigation strategies to preserve these invaluable assets for the long-term future. In many countries, a new figure is already informally emerging inside the cultural heritage sector: the risk manager. There’s usually always someone, within the staff of a Museum, Library, Archive or a cultural institution, that takes it on her or himself to ensure that cultural heritage is protected from extreme weather (e.g. floods) and other natural catastrophic manifestations (e.g. earthquakes). However, this is not enough and this is not always sustainable. There is a need, Europe-wide, for a new, trained, specialized figure, who has the necessary skills, competencies and tools to assess, measure, and monitor, thus prevent, the risks for damages to the tangible cultural heritage due to climate change and poor conservation. Project Partners: MazziniLAB (LP, Italy) WARREDOC (Italy) Arte Generali (Germany) Reinwardt Art School (The Netherlands) Czech Academy of Sciencs (Czech Republic)