ICSM CHC White Paper II: Impacts, vulnerability, and understanding risks of climate change for culture and heritage: Contribution of Impacts Group II to the International CoSponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change

Climate change is already impacting multiple types of heritage across all regions of the world. Future climate change poses increased risks to heritage globally, including losses and damages to heritage of current and future generations and particularly severe impacts on the intangible cultural heritage of Indigenous communities. Climate change impacts on heritage are not being studied consistently nor systematically, which is reflected in heritage coverage in IPCC assessments and special reports. There is a global imbalance in the number of publications assessing the impact of climate change on heritage between different regions. Regional, national and sub-national disparities are also observed (example of Australia East vs. West). As a result, it is difficult to know if what we know about the impact of climate change on heritage is just a reflection of where the science is funded rather than where or when heritage is being affected by climate change. Impacts of climate change on the broader economic benefits (besides tourism), and social and cultural value of heritage are neither investigated nor reviewed globally and rarely explored regionally or locally. Disparities in climate change / heritage publications appear to be determined by research funding, income inequality (within and between countries), colonial legacy (research ties and relationships between former colonies and colonising countries), legal systems of heritage protection (imbalance between natural and cultural heritage depending on the country/region), local vs. international interest in heritage, the language of publication (focus on English excluding other significant scientific languages such as French, Spanish, or Japanese). Improvement of data reliability and resolution allows for more nuanced reconstructions of impacts of past climatic events, facilitating historically important factors of societal adaptation processes proportional to those changes. Yet they do not provide straightforward solutions for contemporary anthropogenic climate change as the scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Alignment of climate change risk terms may facilitate collaboration between climate science and heritage research fields and enhance the likelihood of uptake by large climate change assessments like the IPCC. Innovative methods, especially those which are ideal for assessing social and cultural vulnerability, are needed to integrate the value of intangible cultural heritage with assessments of climate change risk. There is opportunity for climate change / heritage research to embrace transformational, inter- and transdisciplinary, and decolonial principles to address a range of the research and practice challenges as the field matures

The Role of Heritage Data Science in Digital Heritage

The advance of all forms of digital and virtual heritage alongside numerous heritage science and management applications have led to the generation of growing amounts of heritage data. This data is increasingly rich, diverse and powerful. To get the most out of heritage data, there is an evident need to effectively understand, manage and exploit it in a way that is sensitive towards its context, responding to its singularities, and that can allow heritage to keep up with global changes regarding expansion of digital technologies and the increasing role of data in decision making and policy development. Through conversations with industry and academia, as well as through their personal research in the field of cultural heritage, the authors have identified a need for enhanced training for data scientists to prepare them for working in the heritage sector. This paper first proposes a definition of the term heritage data, so far missing from the literature, and then presents the academic rationale behind the identified need for targeted training in data science for cultural heritage