Cultural and Natural Heritage as sustainable social and economic sector that needs better informed management solutions.
Over the last decades, as a consequence of the effects of climate change, Cultural Heritage has been impacted by an increasing number of climate related hazards, posing new challenges to conservators and heritage managers. Disasters and catastrophes pose risks not only to the conservation of cultural heritage assets with its cultural, historic and artistic values, but also to the safety of visitors, staff and local communities. Additionally, they cause undoubtedly negative consequences for the local economies. Cultural Heritage must be considered social and economic sector that needs to be preserved, protected and improved to evolve a cultural resource into a sustainable and profitable community value.
MEEO’s experience
MEEO started working on the impact of climate change to cultural heritage in 2013 with a pilot activity co-funded by Italian Space Agency to demonstrate how satellite data can support the monitoring of relevant UNESCO sites for what concerns air pollution damages. From that experience MEEO has never stopped working in this domain supporting several European research projects bringing experience and knowledge in climate indicators, atmospheric parameters, data exploitation platform and research/public data management.
In the World HEritage monitoring by Remote sEnsing – WHERE project (2014) MEEO implemented the air pollutants mapping service to extract the thermal stress, the carbon surface deposition and the surface erosion indexes. In HERACLES project MEEO supported its branch company SISTEMA in the extraction of both remote sensing and local climate parameters impacting cultural heritages sites. In STRENCH project MEEO provides the technological background to SISTEMA for what concerns the extreme weather events data management and data exploitation.
Projects
Current projects
RescueME
Meeo is proud to be part, as Sistema company’s affiliated, of the RescueME project, funded by Horizon Europe.
The project aims to protect European coastal landscapes and cultural heritage from the climate crisis and natural hazards, developing, testing and demonstrating the effectiveness of an Actionable Framework based on the Resilient Historical Landscape approach (RHL) complemented by data, models, methods, and digital tools able to assess risks and opportunities.
To do this, RescueME is creating a “One-Stop-Shop” for digital tools, and a meta repository of resilience solutions and culture-focused strategies. Furthermore, the project engages stakeholders, facilitating decision making, and enhancing the implementation of solutions to protect our common heritage.
The project is testing this innovative governance frameworks in five pilot cultural landscapes: Psiloritis in Crete, Neuwerk in Hamburg, Portovenere and Cinque Terre in Italy, L’Horta in Valencia, and Zadar in Croatia.
Sistema coordinates the data management of the project to ensure usability, accountability, and quality of the data and valorize it, either by using it for other market applications when possible and relevant or by making it open to the scientific community. This work includes a review of solutions available from previous projects and experiences, with evaluation of the impact on heritage values, the carbon footprint of the solutions, and the Social Return of Investment (SROI).
Moreover, Sistema supports the project’s tools and solutions implementation by identifying relevant data sources and by mapping the related data towards resilience and hazard indicators for building cultural heritage impact models.
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