The new report “Mapping and characterisation of good practices in cultural heritage resilience” is now available online. Its aim is to provide professionals working in municipalities with guidance and inspiration for building the resilience of cultural heritage sites.

The publication summarises insights, lessons learned, and success factors of the select, showcased initiatives, and evaluates their replicability in broader urban contexts.

Forty initiatives – ranging from cultural heritage management plans or risk assessment tools and technologies, to specific restoration actions or training programmes – have been classified according to:

• the type of intervention featured (technological/technical, managerial, behavioural and institutional/policy),
• the hazards they respond to (climate-related, geological-related, human-induced or biological), and
• the disaster risk management phase they correspond to (before disaster, during disaster or after disaster).

Thirty two of these cases are featured as 'snapshots', and eight of them as case studies, for which deeper insights are provided on aspects such as their development, principal actors involved, main outcomes, challenges, factors of success, and lessons learnt.

The report contains additional resources for cities curious about exploring ways to increase the resilience of their cultural heritage, such as the ARCH Initiatives Scoreboard, which presents a set of criteria designed to select good practices among a variety of initiatives, or the ARCH Replicability Scoreboard, which includes a set of criteria to assess the replicability of a certain initiative.

Readers will also become familiar with some key concepts in cultural heritage resilience and disaster risk management, learn about the most common hazards affecting cultural heritage in Europe, and the international and European policy frameworks at the interface of cultural heritage, disaster risk management, and climate change adaptation.

The report was prepared by ICLEI Europe, in close collaboration with Fraunhofer IAIS, Tecnalia and MUOP, as part of the ARCH project, which aims to better protect areas of cultural heritage from climatic and natural hazards.

For more information, please contact Verónica Rebollo (veronica.rebollo@iclei.org) or Vasileios Latinos (vasileios.latinos@iclei.org).

Click here to read more about the ARCH project.