SOS Heritage is funded by the EU's Creative Europe programme, led by Mazzini Lab Società Benefit (IT) and carried out in partnership with four other partner organisations from four European countries: the University for Continuing Education Krems (AT), the Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane (IT), the Transylvania Trust Foundation (RO) and the National Museum Kruševac (RS).

Starting from the European cultural context, the project takes concrete actions to strengthen the cultural sector's capacity to deal with the challenges and opportunities of digitisation and risk management for material cultural heritage.

The project aims to develop and integrate innovative tools to enhance the knowledge and skills of professionals and stakeholders in the field of material cultural heritage (e.g. owners of historic buildings, conservators, restorers, managers and staff of historic buildings, monuments, archaeological sites, museums, archives, libraries and art galleries) in assessing, managing and preventing risks to their collections and buildings caused by natural disasters and climate change, and to establish best practices in promoting material cultural heritage and engaging the public through the use of digital technologies.

Launched by the European Commission at the end of 2019, the 'European Green Deal' has the ambitious goal of bringing together a wide range of policy measures to tackle a number of interlinked problems, including the existential challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. However, as the 'Green Paper on European Cultural Heritage' (2021) shows, there is one crucial point missing from this plan: the words 'heritage', 'art', 'culture' and 'landscape' do not appear. In the future, however, extreme events such as heavy rainfall and flooding will become more intense in Central Europe and the Mediterranean. The frequency and/or duration of hot spells and heat waves will increase over many parts of Europe. The intensity and/or duration of droughts is also likely to increase, particularly in some regions of southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Forest fires have also already significantly affected these regions, and this trend is likely to continue.

The impact of these events on cultural heritage will result in different processes of deterioration, depending also on the material composition of the walls, structures, monuments, works of art, etc. present at the sites. In recent years, many international organisations (including UNESCO, ICCROM and ICOMOS) have highlighted the urgent need for systemic changes in the approach to risk management and prevention.

In 2020, as the threat of climate change continued to grow, the COVID 19 pandemic crisis hit the cultural sector with a new and unexpected force: the closures and sanitation measures to contain the pandemic resulted in empty museums and archives, unexplored monuments, castles and buildings, abandoned archaeological sites, and unfinished conservation and restoration processes. This catastrophe has given rise to new trends and habits that present both opportunities and challenges for the cultural sector. These include the acceleration of digital transformation and the growing importance of digital access to culture.

SOS Heritage takes concrete steps to strengthen the cultural sector's capacity to address the challenges and opportunities of digitisation, digital access and risk management for cultural heritage by delivering 3 key innovative outcomes:

1. Collection of best practice in digital content creation and communication for successful stakeholder and public engagement.
2. Web application for the assessment and management of risks to tangible cultural heritage.
3. Open online training course for professional risk managers in the field of tangible cultural heritage.

These objectives have the potential to improve the capacity of professionals to assess and manage risks to cultural heritage in the context of climate-related natural disasters. In many countries, a new profession is informally emerging in the cultural sector: the risk manager. Professionals and stakeholders in the field of material cultural heritage need specific skills and competences to assess the risks to their collections and objects, to carry out deeper and more accurate analyses and to develop functioning risk management plans.

The project aims to strengthen the following skills of cultural heritage professionals:

• Digitisation of cultural objects, historic sites and buildings
• Communication and presentation of cultural heritage and communication with the public to build relationships with stakeholders
• Prevention and risk management in relation to natural and non-natural hazards