Resilient Eco-Smart Strategies and Innovative Technologies to Protect Cultural Heritage

Abstract

In all parts of Europe Cultural Heritage represents a significant economic sector on which many communities depend. However, built CH artefacts are under continuous degradation from environmental and anthropological effects, and face significant risk of catastrophic damage from events such as flooding, earthquakes, storm and fires, which are themselves exacerbated by the impact of climate change. Action must be taken to manage these risks and mitigate their effect, however traditional approaches have been fragmented between different areas of expertise and disciplines, without regard to the combined effect of such uncoordinated interventions, leading to ineffective and often detrimental impact on the very assets they seek to protect. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new holistic approach to the effective safeguarding and management of built CH artifacts through the provision of a decision support platform based upon interdisciplinary resilience modelling of current and future risks and interventions, monitoring and analysis of CH assets and natural hazards, creation of a semantic knowledge base and vulnerability, risk and cost modelling for planning and implementing intervention strategies. The main goal of this research is to deliver an architecture that takes account of and supports mitigation of the inter-related impact of environmental, climatic and anthropogenic factors on such significant cultural heritage assets as are represented by the world heritage sites acting as primary use cases for the project. The economic impact of such interventions is also addressed, since the financial importance of tourism at these sites must be balanced with the cost of intervention to protect them whilst recognising the socio-economic benefits to be gained.