Climate Impact on Built Heritage (CLIMPACTH). (CLIMPACTH)

CLIMPACTH scopes safeguarding our built heritage in the context of climate change by combining state-of-the-art expertise on material characterization, degradation processes, hygrothermal modelling, climate modelling and built heritage. Our built heritage is an invaluable collection, being of exceptional cultural, social and economic importance. At the same time, it is also fragile and vulnerable due to its longterm exposure to the environment. Therefore, the sustainable management of our built heritage requires the implementation of actions to reduce its vulnerability and to increase its resilience to the risks of climate change. Furthermore, as the public and private sectors are pushed to invest in near-zero energy buildings for economic, ecologic and climate action reasons, the pressure on our built heritage to follow the same path is increasing, posing an additional threat to its historical and cultural values. Caring about our built heritage also means caring about the collections kept within, as historic houses, museums and churches are often located within built heritage. At the international level, the EU-funded projects NOAH's ARK (2004-2007) and Climate for Culture (2009-2014) set the first monumental steps to study the direct and indirect effects of climate change on built heritage at the European level. In addition, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) has recently established a working group on climate change and heritage to comprehensively scope the intersection between cultural heritage and climate change, identifying both the strengths and challenges in this regard. CLIMPACTH will further build on these research initiatives at the international level and maximize collaboration with research initiatives at the national level to address the needs to adopt a global management strategy following the preventive conservation approach. The processes underlying these risk factors can be understood as material degradation in response to their constant exposure to various climate factors. In addition to these research initiatives, it is imperative to advance our knowledge of the characterization of historic materials and projected climatic parameters to address the risk assessment in an overall management strategy. The former will be assessed through in-depth research on material characteristics and degradation processes, and on-site assessment and monitoring of building envelope conditions. This will allow us to comprehensively generalize the built heritage envelopes and their condition for hygrothermal modelling. The latter can be assessed by estimating the evolution of climate factors under climate change conditions and their uncertainty using an ensemble of climate projections at global, regional and urban scales. This will allow us to propagate the uncertainties in climate projection to the scale of heritage buildings using dedicated bias correction methods. It will also allow us to carry out an integrated assessment of the degradation of risks under climate change conditions. By examining the particular conditions of built heritage and its exposure to the outdoor climate, risk factors will be reassessed and assessment strategies will be developed, taking into account the impact of the exterior on the interior and prioritizing the main threats.

Keywords:HYPERSPECTRAL DATA ANALYSIS, HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGING SYSTEMS

Disciplines:Conservation-restoration techniques

Project type:Collaboration project