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Culture, Heritage and Identities: Impacts of Climate Change in North West Europe

Project description

Using digital technology to examine damaged or lost heritage sites due to climate change

Cultural heritage provides identity and a means of livelihood to local communities. When it is damaged, the communities are directly impacted as they experience a loss of their sense of place and belonging. Northwestern Europe is expected to experience more widespread heritage loss due to climate change. The EU-funded CHICC project seeks to understand the impact of climate change on heritage sites by closely examining three sites in Denmark, Ireland and Scotland. The project will adopt a citizen science approach and actively include communities to understand how climate change impacts them. CHICC will launch an online deep map resource to create a digital preservation strategy.

Objective

CHICC aims to understand the impact of climate-change driven heritage loss on local communities. The widespread impacts of climate change are acknowledged in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action; however, the full scale of the impacts on heritage and associated communities is currently unknown but knowable.
Three damaged or lost heritage sites will be explored through CHICC: Mårup, Denmark; Dunbeag, Ireland; Brora, Scotland. Each has been altered by climate change, creating an impact on the lives and livelihoods of local communities, their sense of place and belonging, their perception of climate change; overall, impacting their cultural identities. As North-West Europe is expected to experience greater and more widespread heritage loss due to climate change, CHICC will use these sites to understand the complexity of loss, and the impact on communities and their cultural identities.
Through adopting a Citizen Science approach, CHICC will include the often-omitted voice of local communities to understand how climate change impacts them, which may include an upsurge in engagement with climate change mitigation, greater energy for preservation or forgetting.
Communities will be active participants within the research, contributing their views, ideas and resources. Through co-creation, CHICC will launch an online, deepmap for three damaged or lost heritage sites. The deepmap will collate and democratise multidisciplinary, primary and secondary data to interrogate the relationship between climate change, heritage and culture. This open-access resource will be created in-line with a Digital Preservation Strategy to ensure reuse of data for future researchers and varied stakeholder groups.
The methodology developed includes co-creation and Citizen Science, underpinned by well-integrated interdisciplinarity, thus allows for impact and relevance for the numerous stakeholder groups with vested interested in heritage, climate change and the future.

Coordinator

AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution
€ 207 312,00
Address
NORDRE RINGGADE 1
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark

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Region
Danmark Midtjylland Østjylland
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 207 312,00