Saving heritage sites from tomorrow's disasters
From historic churches to world-famous landmarks, Bartlett researchers are exploring how heritage sites can become more resilient to disasters and environmental change
Disasters affecting heritage have increased in both frequency and intensity. From the floods in Valencia and Libya, to the rising tides around the Moai on Rapa Nui or Bangladesh’s Bagerhat mosques, heritage teams all over the world are facing unexpected and evolving challenges.
“Effective disaster preparedness involves thinking about risks in a different way,” says Dr Scott Allan Orr, Associate Professor of Heritage and Environmental Risk at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage (ISH).
“There have always been environmental risks for heritage. Climate change can introduce new challenges and amplify existing ones. Instead of thinking about risks as simply a problem that has to be solved, we have to accept that risks are unavoidable. They’re things to be managed, and that’s where the preparedness comes in.”
The risks of living heritage
A new study by Dr Xing Wang, Dr Jennifer Griffiths, Prof Adam Gibson and Dr Pakhee Kumar sheds new light on the additional vulnerability that gaps between the academic theory and real-world practice of risk management can create.
“When thinking about disasters and hazards, people tend to focus on environmental hazards like wildfires and earthquakes,” says Xing.
“However, the vulnerability of heritage sites often involves social or intrinsic physical factors, such as fragile collections, complicated old structural elements, and, of course, funding limitations.
“These factors increase the susceptibility of heritage sites to the impacts of hazards.”
The study, 'Disaster management practices in churches in London, UK', explores disaster risk, response and recovery through interviews with clergy and other key individuals at Church of England heritage locations across the capital.
Churches and other religious institutions are living cultural heritage. They don’t just contain tangible historic value, through their architecture and artifacts. The rituals, practices and events of church life bring intangible cultural value to the communities that inhabit them.
These activities also bring risk, as Xing explains.
“Some rituals and events bring specific risk – and we’ve observed this across a wide range of cultural heritage sites.
“For example, Buddhist temples often burn incense for rituals. Many sites experience severe overcrowding during specific periods throughout the year. These practices and events are highly meaningful for the community, but they also place a heavy burden on site management.”
Another factor affecting disaster preparedness at heritage sites everywhere is the capacity of the management team.
Xing says, “Cultural heritage sites all over the world struggle with limited resources, particularly human resources. There’s a lot of multidisciplinary expertise needed for disaster risk management on heritage sites, and for a lot of these sites, they just don’t have the levels of expertise across all the different areas, such as engineering, that you might need.”
Communities – the key to the future of heritage?
“Disaster preparedness is about practical planning. Thinking about the role of community is a practical thing that’s very much within the control of an organisation. You can’t reduce the magnitude of a flood. Having more money won’t reduce the hazard, but a community can help mitigate the risks to their heritage sites.”
When cultural heritage sites lack expertise or resources, communities often step in to help. For example, following a disaster, local communities are frequently the first to provide emergency assistance to damaged heritage sites. However, as the paper notes, the communities often aren’t integrated in disaster management plans.
This is particularly true for religious institutions. Tellingly, one of the disaster risks identified by several church site managers during Xing’s interviews was the steady decline in church attendance.
“The declining numbers further limit capacity,” says Xing. “This means fewer human resources, and even less expertise, which makes the church even more vulnerable.”
"You can’t reduce the magnitude of a flood. Having more money won’t reduce the hazard, but a community can help mitigate the risks to their heritage sites"
- Dr Xing Wang
Crowdsourced emergency response
Pakhee’s research has shown that following disasters, people from across different locations often mobilise to help protect threatened heritage sites.
“In the past, people have provided money, materials and knowledge to save heritage. They have also worked as volunteers under really difficult conditions. In present times, people also provide information to rapidly analyse damage and preserve memory of heritage.”
Another study by UCL ISH researchers, led by Prof Josep Grau-Bové and Dr Richard Higham with Pakhee and Scott, uses publicly available data to provide rapid assessments of damage to cultural heritage sites following disasters, most notably the flooding that affected Valencia in October 2024.
Their team combined the European Space Agency's Copernicus satellite data about the flood with a range of other data sources that included crowdsourced data from Google’s OpenStreetMap.
By overlaying the flood maps with the heritage site coordinates, the UCL team was able to provide the damage investigators with lists of the heritage sites that were most likely to have been badly affected by the floods.
Mapping the heritage sites was a technical challenge, as Richard explains. “There are often different lists and different data sets for different types of heritage, so we had to condense all that down into a single map that people could use.”
This isn’t the first time UCL ISH researchers have drawn on open-source data for disaster response investigation. In an earlier study, Dr Pakhee Kumar used machine learning to analyse thousands of social media images, training models to identify damaged heritage sites after disasters. Explore a demonstration of the tool.
Bringing new tools and ideas to hallowed places
Improving disaster response processes is an important strand of UCL’s Institute for Sustainable Heritage. “Heritage isn’t always the first thing that needs to be addressed after a disaster,” says Richard.
“But actually, once the first needs of a disaster have been met, heritage is often quite high on a community’s list of priorities. So we’re trying to provide methods that people can use for their own preparedness.”
Scott is keen to outline the varied contributions that ISH research is delivering in the area of disaster preparedness and disaster risk management.
“It’s about trying to approach it in many different ways.
“The work we did in Valencia is very much on the technical, data-led side – thinking about information that’s readily available, and using it to inform organisational preparedness and rapid response.
“However, the work Xing’s been doing, with Pakhee’s support, is very much about people and how they think, and how that then informs the systems they create. We actually need much more literature and exploration of those concepts.”
A map showing heritage that was potentially affected by the flooding in Valencia in 2024. Image credit: Richard Higham
A map showing heritage that was potentially affected by the flooding in Valencia in 2024. Image credit: Richard Higham
About the authors
Dr Pakhee Kumar
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