The Istanbul meeting saw a prolonged, and ultimately unresolved debate about whether the IPCC’s main reports could, or should, be produced in time to help inform the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) second global stocktake (GST2), to be completed in 2028, in which nations will again assess their collective progress towards achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. 

The issue of timing and content for IPCC reports is complex and the discussions in Istanbul were driven not just by scientific practicality and policy-relevance, but also by differing political perspectives among developed countries, nations of the Global South (with varying degrees of economic development and climate vulnerability), and petrostates.

IPCC reports need more inclusion of Global South scientists

The Istanbul meeting also reviewed a report on lessons learned from the IPCC’s 6th assessment cycle (AR6), and established a Task Force to be co-chaired by the US and South Africa to consider the many issues raised. Representation and inclusion were core among these issues. In this and the subsequent discussions about the process for AR7, numerous developing countries identified the need to increase participation and information from the Global South in the IPCC process and reports. This included being more proactive in including women scientists and authors and reviewers from developing countries. IPCC authors in the past have been skewed towards men working in the physical sciences in Europe and North America.

Further, many delegates, especially from the Global South, agreed that the IPCC needs to find ways to use a wider evidence base that better utilizes non-English language source material, and addresses the limited availability of observational data from many parts of the developing world. Several delegates, including from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Madagascar, Sri Lanka and Niger pointed out the gaps caused by lack of updated or detailed regional data for their countries.

Barriers to the inclusion of information from developing countries include the fact that high subscription costs for academic and research journals limit Global South authors’ access to publications, while fees that can run into thousands of dollars for publishing in scientific journals often preclude developing country researchers’ work from reaching the peer-reviewed literature. 

Reporting on cultural heritage and climate change

At the Istanbul meeting, I was able to present the official scientific co-chairs’ report from the International Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change co-sponsored by the IPCC, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), that also dealt with issues of inclusion. The presentation was timely because the latest framework for the global goal on adaptation (GGA) which was agreed upon at COP28 included specific commitments on protecting cultural heritage to be undertaken by countries in 2030, so the information the IPCC can provide before then will be important. 

The cultural heritage and climate science meeting, which UCS’s Director of Climate Science, Brenda Ekwurzel participated in, was built around three core themes–the first being knowledge systems. This theme included an examination of the nature and scope of representation of culture and heritage in existing climate literature. It also addressed integration and inclusion of diverse knowledge systems, especially Indigenous and traditional knowledge, across areas of climate research and policy. The second theme was around climate impacts–reviewing loss, damage, and adaptation for tangible and intangible cultural heritage. This included understanding different approaches to cultural significance, adaptation prioritization, and diverse ways of dealing with loss and change.

The third theme addressed solutions, examining the roles of culture and heritage in transformative climate action and sustainable futures. This section included discussion of the capacity of historic buildings, cultural landscapes and traditional land use to store carbon, and contribute to resilience in the face of climate disasters and loss and damage. Results from the meeting were published in 2022 as the Global Research and Action Agenda on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change.

In my Istanbul presentation, I put forward several recommendations from the scientific co-chairs of the meeting to the IPCC, including that the panel should:

• Organize an Expert Meeting on culture, heritage and climate change during the AR7 cycle.
• Incorporate culture and heritage as a crosscutting topic across multiple products in the AR7, including the planned Special Report on Cities.
• Evaluate the potential for a dedicated chapter on culture and heritage including a focus on Indigenous and traditional knowledge, during the Working Group 2 scoping process.
• Enhance efforts to invite nominations for IPCC participation in scoping and expert meetings, and as authors and reviewers, of individuals with cultural heritage expertise, as well as Indigenous scientists and Indigenous and traditional knowledge holders.
• Establish a Task Force or Expert Meeting with the goal of developing new guidelines for accessing and incorporating Indigenous and local knowledge through the AR7 cycle and beyond.

Including Indigenous knowledge in IPCC work 

These recommendations, especially those championing greater inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous science were in line with much that was said by country delegates in Istanbul interested in improving and expanding IPCC’s approach to this issue. 

Although AR6 acknowledged that Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous science are needed to fight climate change, help address adaptation and prevent maladaptation, it’s clear AR7 needs to do more. Australia, Brazil, Burundi, Guatemala, Italy, Kenya, Libya and New Zealand all stressed this. Canada called for the establishment of a task group with Indigenous leadership to examine how Indigenous knowledge could be effectively included in the work of the IPCC and offered to host an IPCC Expert Meeting on the topic. 

Bolivia in particular championed Indigenous knowledge, several times calling for the comprehensive inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and full recognition of different epistemologies and ontologies, many of which make no separation between people and nature. 

Reinforcing that point Lisa Koperqualuk, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, the first Indigenous Peoples Organization to be recognized as an observer to the IPCC made reference to sila, the all-pervasive, life-giving force that connects Inuit people to their environment. In her powerful interventions, Koperqualuk also said: 

“Indigenous people must be equitably and ethically engaged in all research and policy that impacts them, and for us, and other underrepresented communities, this implies being fully involved in process”. And noted that “Indigenous peoples should not only be viewed as a vulnerable group, but as an equal partner in this work, with an intimate knowledge of our lands, water and ice…”

At the end of the final day of negotiations in Istanbul which ran through the night and lasted more than 24 grueling hours, one of the agreements in the final decision document was to use diverse sources and knowledge systems, including Indigenous and traditional knowledge in the AR7 cycle. A small step, but an important one. And one we will work to help the IPCC build on.

1. The recognition of cultural heritage as one of seven thematic targets in the new Framework for the Global Goal on Adaption. 

One of the major agreements at COP28 was on a new framework for achieving the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), which for the first time identified cultural heritage as a core theme. The GGA urges nations to protect “cultural heritage from the impacts of climate-related risks by developing adaptive strategies for preserving cultural practices and heritage sites and by designing climate-resilient infrastructure, guided by traditional knowledge, Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge and local knowledge systems”. This recognition not just of the vital importance of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, but also of Indigenous and traditional knowledge, represents a major step forward achieved at COP28. Unfortunately, however, as was pointed out by several delegates from the Global South, the framework decision on the GGA fell far short in providing the finance needed for adaptation in vulnerable countries. 

2. The launch of the Group of Friends of Culture Based Climate Action 

COP 28 saw the convening of the first ever multilateral High-Level Ministerial Dialogue on Culture-based Climate Action chaired by Brazil and the UAE. The convening, which was supported by the Climate Heritage Network (of which UCS is a founding member), resulted in the adoption of the Emirates Declaration on Culture-based Climate Action, supported by more than 20 countries, including Egypt, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Italy, Jordan, Mali, Pakistan, Senegal, Spain and Uganda. The group specifically referenced the inclusion of heritage impacts in the IPCC’s 6^th Assessment Report and the International Meeting on Culture, Heritage and Climate Change co-sponsored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and UNESCO, held in December 2021. UCS’s Director of Climate Science, Brenda Ekwurzel, was a contributing expert at that meeting, and its final report emphasized the importance of addressing cultural heritage impacts and adaptation in future IPCC reports, and of giving full weight to Indigenous and traditional knowledge. 

The Emirates Declaration recognizes “the devastating impacts of climate change already being felt today by people across the globe, the threat to tangible and intangible heritage risks leading to significant disruption of inter-generational transmission of socio-cultural practices, infringement on cultural rights of peoples and communities, and limitation of cultural diversity, thereby depriving us of precious sources of resilience, meaning, identity, knowledge, livelihoods, and economic benefits”.  

At the core of the Emirates Declaration is a commitment to “Scaling-up culture and heritage-based strategies for enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience, avoiding maladaptation, and reducing vulnerability to climate change impacts”. The Group of Friends announced their intention to meet again at COP29, and prior to that explore the potential for a COP29 decision to launch a joint work program on culture and climate action to be addressed at COP30 in Brazil.  

3. A loss and damage fund which addresses cultural heritage 

The new Loss and Damage Fund (to be at least temporarily hosted by the World Bank) will provide financial support to developing countries for recovery, reconstruction and rehabilitation, as well as funding to address ongoing impacts such as sea level rise, aridification and biodiversity loss. Crucially, the loss and damage fund will include support not just for climate impacts that can be assigned a monetary value, but also for non-economic losses, including most types of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Current pledges to the fund stand at nearly $800 million, but it is estimated that $400 billion or more will be required annually by 2030. The US has pledged just $17.5 million. 

Where do we go from here?  

As preparations begin for COP29 in Azerbaijan and a new IPCC assessment cycle starts, there are some clear priorities for advancing action on climate and heritage. For example, there will be opportunities to provide input on what measures could be implemented by national governments, including the US, under the newly agreed Global Goal on Adaptation cultural heritage theme. Meanwhile, UCS will also work to increase the number of countries that support the goal of the Emirates Declaration to initiate a new work program in cultural heritage and climate action at COP29, and to outline what such a work program should include. At the IPCC UCS will advocate for increased recognition of Indigenous and traditional knowledge, and the inclusion of more Indigenous and Global South scientists. 

Furthermore, to make the Loss and Damage Fund truly effective for addressing irreversible climate impacts on cultural heritage, it will be necessary to develop methodologies for monitoring and assessing non-economic loss and damage (NELD) – especially of intangible heritage such as cultural practices, languages, Indigenous and traditional knowledge, ecosystem services and culturally important species of plants and animals. Much cultural heritage cannot – or in the view of many people, should not – be assigned a monetary value, so there is an urgent need to explore and develop new options for reparations and ways of providing cultural redress. One example of how this might be achieved lies in New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal process, which in addition to financial payments, has used land sovereignty grants, place name changes and joint resource management agreements to resolve Indigenous compensation claims dating to the colonial era. Non-economic loss and damage is context-specific, and it’s vital that impacted communities be fully involved in identifying and assessing losses, and in determining what remedies can be applied. UCS is committed to helping to find and support innovative compensation mechanisms for cultural loss and damage. 

Cultural rights include the right to freedom for scientific research and creative activity, and the right to participate in cultural life. The foundational document of international human rights law is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It asserts that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

The subsequent 1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights also recognizes the right of “everyone to take part in cultural life” and requires signatories to take the steps “necessary for the conservation, the development, and the diffusion of science and culture.”

In 2001, the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity affirmed that “cultural rights are an integral part of human rights, which are universal, indivisible, and interdependent….” It states that cultural diversity “is the common heritage of humanity and should be recognized and affirmed for the benefit of present and future generations.” It describes the defense of cultural diversity as “an ethical imperative, inseparable from respect for human dignity,” and asserts that “heritage in all its forms must be preserved, enhanced, and handed on to future generations.” In 2016, the Human Rights Council declared that damage to cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, of any people, constitutes damage to the cultural heritage of humanity as a whole.

Nations have a duty, therefore, to protect and not interfere with cultural life. This includes cultural heritage, which is the tangible and intangible expressions of communities’ ways of being that are developed and passed from generation to generation.

Climate impacts as human rights violations

It’s widely accepted that climate change is the cause of human rights violations for millions of people, including their rights to adequate housing, healthy working conditions, safe drinking water, education, and a healthy environment. But it is less often acknowledged in climate science and policy circles that cultural heritage is a human right vital for people’s sense of identity and wellbeing, and for the vitality, stability, and resilience of their communities. By recognizing and documenting the threat of climate change to cultural heritage, we add one more important layer of rights-based obligations to hold nations accountable for reducing carbon emissions.

Cultural heritage is under immediate and urgent threat from climate change worldwide. Flooding, coastal erosion, wildfires, thawing permafrost, and extreme weather events are causing unprecedented loss and damage of places and customs. Some sites and traditional practices that need protection for future generations are recognized under UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention, and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage, and more are being added to the protected lists every year.

World Heritage cities such as Venice, Italy, and Hoi An, Vietnam, are threatened. Archaeological sites, including thousands in the Arctic, are being damaged or irrevocably lost. And, living cultural landscapes, such as the summer cattle pastures of the Austrian Alps and the Hani people’s rice terraces in Yunnan, China, are vulnerable to climate change.

Intangible cultural heritage threatened

Historic buildings, archaeological sites, museum and archive collections, and cultural landscapes are all examples of tangible cultural heritage. But intangible cultural heritage is just as important and equally threatened. Intangible heritage includes languages and dialects, traditional knowledge and practices, foodways, festivals, rituals, crafts, art forms, folklore, oral traditions, and cosmologies. Many climate threats to intangible heritage have been identified.

For example, sea level rise and climate-driven migration from the islands threatens Vanuatu sand drawing traditions, endangering the passing down of important traditional knowledge on kinship, farming, and seasonal cycles. The drawings use complex geometric patterns which also facilitate communication among many of Vanuatu’s 110 different language groups.

In the Great Lakes region of the United States, changing seasonal ice conditions are putting at risk “snow snake,” a culturally important game which for many Ojibwe youth is a rite of passage. The game is traditionally played in March, the month known in Ojibwe as Onaabani-Giizis, or Crust-on-Snow Moon. Competitors use wooden poles representing the long spears that were traditionally used for hunting on the ice at this time of year.

In 2021, the UN Special Rapporteur on cultural rights, Karima Bennoune, presented a report on climate change and human rights to the UN General Assembly highlighting the lack of attention that has been paid by both human rights and climate experts to the cultural rights dimensions of climate change. She noted the existential threat to the cultural survival of entire populations, such as those of small island states including the Maldives and Tuvalu, and the special threat to Indigenous peoples at risk of having to move voluntarily or forcibly from ancestral lands, or those forced to move from unique environments such as the Arctic. She concluded that “the universality of human rights, including cultural rights, has no meaning today without a liveable environment in which they can be enjoyed.”

Indigenous heritage at risk

Cultural rights have a special importance for Indigenous peoples who are often marginalized or actively persecuted, and whose cultural practices and heritage are deeply enmeshed with nature and specific places and landscapes. Native American ceremonial expressions of relationships with animal and plant species, often associated with particular places, are vital expressions of identity, with connections to creation stories, the afterlife, and seasonal and hunting rituals.

The 2023 Climate Vulnerability Assessment carried out by the inter-tribal Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission combined Traditional Ecological Knowledge and western science to look at climate risk to culturally important non-human beings in the reservations and Ceded Territories of the Ojibwe people. The assessment identified several species as particularly severely at risk from climate change, including snowshoe hare, lake white fish, tamarack, and wild rice (manoomin). Manoomin, the most climate-vulnerable species is also the most important cultural touchstone, deeply enmeshed in Ojibwe identity. As knowledge-holder Sean Fahrlander says, “There is no origin story for wild rice. It’s elemental, it was there from the beginning… it’s like the original berry. It always existed…. It’s its own spirit and everything flows from that.” Loss of wild rice would cut to the core of Ojibwe culture.

Loss and damage to Indigenous cultural heritage was the subject of the most important legal decision on climate and cultural rights to date; In September 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee found that Australia had failed to protect the cultural rights of Torres Straits islanders in the face of climate change.

Warming oceans and ocean acidification have already impacted coral reefs, crayfish, and seagrass beds that are important culturally and economically for the Torres Straits islanders. Sea level rise, coastal flooding and erosion due to more extreme storms have drastically affected traditional food gardens and plantations, and damaged coconut groves. Traditional Ecological Knowledge dependent on weather conditions has become less reliable in a changing climate. Burial grounds are being flooded, harming the islanders’ ability to communicate with their ancestors. Culturally important initiation and coming-of-age ceremonies are at risk of degradation as they are only of value if performed on the traditional native lands of each community.

The UN Human Rights Committee noted the responsibility of Australia to protect the environment whose health is integral to the cultural integrity of the islanders. It called for compensation from the government, and for Australia to take more aggressive measures to prevent climate change at the national and international levels.

What’s next for climate and cultural rights?

It’s to be expected (and hoped) that we will soon see many more of these types of cases.

In 2023, in the U.S., courts in Montana and Hawaii ruled for the first time that people have the right to a stable climate. Also in 2023, more than 130 nations voted at the UN General Assembly to support a request spearheaded by Vanuatu for the International Court of Justice to issue an advisory opinion on the obligations of states to prevent damage from climate change caused by their emissions.

As the climate and human rights communities begin to come together to understand and address climate impacts on cultural rights, it is essential that we do a better job of monitoring and recording loss and damage to cultural heritage.

Identifying tangible and intangible cultural heritage at risk must become a priority, something the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has not yet adequately addressed. A joint meeting of experts from IPCC, UNESCO and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) has acknowledged this and has highlighted the importance of integrating cultural heritage, including Indigenous and traditional knowledge, in climate science and policy in the future.

UCS will make advocating for this a priority in the IPCC, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the World Heritage Convention. Meanwhile, the evolving frameworks of international human rights law and growing body of climate litigation will help to ensure that governments can no longer ignore the impacts of climate change on cultural rights with impunity.

Venice is dying because of climate and tourism

Venice is a city in crisis. Its population is shrinking because of a severe lack of affordable housing which is driven by real estate speculation and the demand for Airbnb-style short term vacation rentals. Meanwhile, Venice authorities are struggling to manage the impact of more than 25 million tourists annually (many arriving on giant cruise ships), and the vast and ecologically important lagoon is suffering from agricultural and industrial pollution.

On top of all this, climate change has become a truly existential threat for the ancient city. Sea level rise and worsening storms are wreaking havoc. There have been more than 160 serious flooding events in the last three decades, as many as in the 120 years previous to that.

One of the most recent serious floods was In November 2019, when almost 90% of the city was inundated, damaging more than 80 ecclesiastical buildings including the bell tower of San Dorato in Murano and mosaic floor of the 7th century church of Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello. The crypt and basement of St. Mark’s Basilica was flooded for only the second time in its history.

Venice was founded as a marshy refuge in the 5^th century and grew into one of and most powerful medieval trading empires. As its wealth grew, the city expanded over more than 100 islands in the lagoon, and was characterized by its cosmopolitan maritime culture, system of canals and panoply of opulent residences and churches.

From its earliest days, Venetian buildings were constructed on underwater wooden piles sunk into the lagoon’s sediment. It’s been estimated that as many as 11 million timber piles lie under the city, many of them still supporting buildings, including St. Mark’s basilica (parts of which are more than 1,000 years old and which is known for its exquisite medieval gold mosaics).

Being fully under the water, the wood didn’t rot, and from the 13^th century, impermeable limestone quarried in Istria (now Croatia) was used to build foundations and basements on top of the piles. Courses of brickwork were then laid on the limestone, out of the reach of water so as not high enough to suffer damage.

From the 14^th to the 17^th centuries, major diversions of the rivers flowing into the lagoon were undertaken, resulting in a deepening of the lagoon. Natural land subsidence has also long been a problem, but it was dramatically exacerbated through the 20^th century, driven largely by water use by industries along the mainland coast of the lagoon, which significantly depleted groundwater resources.

Today, the combination of accelerating sea level rise and ground subsidence puts the city and its infrastructure increasingly at risk from flooding and water damage. Water permeable building materials, including brickwork and marble are no longer out of reach of the surface of the saline lagoon. When wave action, boat wakes, storm surges and floodwaters wet the stone, salts are drawn inwards and upwards by capillary action, crystalizing when the materials dry, and causing structural damage.

The rate of sea level rise of the Venice Lagoon in the period 1993-2019 is estimated to be more than double the rate it averaged over the whole period from 1872 when water level records in the city began. Sea levels are now 32 centimetres (about 12 inches) higher than in 1872, and evidence from proxies, including close analysis of the painter Canaletto’s works suggest water level 61 centimetres (about 24 inches) above that of the 1750s.

Projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios suggest a further rise of between 32 and 110 centimetres (about 12 to 43 inches) by the end of this century.

Venice has tried a range of measures to reduce the impacts of climate change, including most recently placing glass flood barriers around St. Mark’s Basilica. The most ambitious of these are the MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico) barriers which can be raised to temporarily close off the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea.

Work on the barriers began in 2003 and after being beset by planning, engineering and corruption issues (and with the cost having ballooned to more than $8 billion) they were first raised to prevent a serious flood in October 2020. Since then the flood gates have been raised nearly 50 times, at an estimated cost of more than $200,000 each time, with annual maintenance costing in excess of $60 million.

The threat of flooding is so great that scientists have observed that eventually, to protect the city the MOSE gates may have to be closed more often than they are open, perhaps 300 times a year as the waters continue to rise. This will dramatically restrict the natural flow of water in and out of the lagoon and have a very negative effect on the water quality and ecology of the lagoon, one of the largest and most important wetlands in the Mediterranean region. It’s not even clear that the MOSE gates will be able to cope with future sea level rise because they were designed well before the latest IPCC projections.

An opportunity lost

Is it possible to save the city and the lagoon? The addition of Venice to the World Heritage In Danger list would almost certainly have resulted in renewed focus, cooperation and funding for increasing the Venice’s climate resilience, as well as putting some pressure on city and national authorities to deilver results. The decision not to place Venice on the “in danger” list comes nine years after the idea of doing so was first suggested. In the intervening years there has been some progress, not least because MOSE has become operational, but not enough. A 2020 UNESCO advisory mission to Venice concluded that progress was too slow and that the situation will continue to deteriorate without improvements in strategic vision, site management, communication amongst stakeholders and governance as well as the development of additional measures to minimize climate and tourism impacts. 

In recommending the “in danger” listing, the UNESCO secretariat explicitly asked to be able to review a comprehensive climate action strategy and controversial plans to raise the island on which St. Mark’s Basilica sits (currently the lowest part of the city). It also called for expanded and ongoing monitoring of the effectiveness and use of the MOSE barriers and the ecological health of the lagoon, and for the deployment of more resources to manage flooding and repair flood impacts to historic buildings. 

The World Heritage In Danger list is one important mechanism that the parties to the Convention have to hold each other accountable for their responsibilities to protect humankind’s shared natural and cultural heritage. By failing to list Venice and punting any follow-up decision to at least 2024, the Committee has shown a lamentable inability to engage with the urgency of the climate threat not just to one remarkable city, but to all of our collective natural and cultural heritage.

Ultimately though, the greatest contribution would be for all the 195 nations who are parties to the World Heritage Convention, and most especially the biggest polluters among them, including the United States, to redouble their own efforts to reduce heat-trapping emissions.

Venice, Italy, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef endangered

Listing Venice would be a significant move forward because it would demonstrate that the Convention’s member countries recognize the need to respond to climate threats to World Heritage and take steps to increase accountability for inaction. But while Venice may be put on the In Danger list, another site that most certainly should be, won’t be. Vigorous lobbying by Australian diplomats prevented the Great Barrier Reef from being listed in 2021, and now yet another delay in considering this politically charged question has been recommended by the Convention’s secretariat, meaning a decision won’t be taken until the 2024 World Heritage Committee meeting. Meanwhile, coral scientists say that a developing El Niño will likely cause major bleaching and coral diebacks on the reef this year, and that Australia is dragging its feet in reducing carbon pollution and failing to pull back on new coal and gas developments which harm the reef. Scientists have identified warm water coral reefs as one of the ecosystems most at risk even if we are able to stay below Paris Climate Agreement temperature limits. 

A new climate policy for World Heritage

The debate over whether climate change should ever be a criteria for In Danger listing has also been a point of contention in the development of a much-needed climate policy for the World Heritage Convention. After several years of discussions, the Committee forwarded the draft new climate policy to the UNESCO General Assembly in 2021, but it was sent it back to an ad hoc committee to try to resolve several remaining sticking points, including whether the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) as defined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) should be included or not. Australia, Japan, Norway, and the US have all opposed CBDR as an approach to World Heritage. Observers of the negotiations note that the US at one point also tried to remove references to the Paris Agreement’s principle goal of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile Brazil, Saudia Arabia and some other countries appear to have little interest in seeing an agreed climate policy emerge at all. 

World Heritage under threat

Why this latter recommendation is important is clear from the nominations that are up for review this year. Only a few countries have provided useful information as to how climate change may affect the places in question. For example, the Spanish government described no climate risk to the 3-4,000 year-old archaeological sites of the proposed Talayotic Minorca World Heritage site, but the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)—one of the three technical advisory bodies to the convention—has identified climate change and the increasing risk of catastrophic wildfires on the Balearic island of Minorca as a major threat.

Similarly, climate change was not mentioned at all in the nomination dossier prepared by Iran for its series of 16th-18th century Persian Caravanserai sites. For over 2,000 years caravanserai provided safe resting places & accommodations for merchants, pilgrims and other travelers along major trade routes including the Silk Roads, and were usually constructed from locally available materials such as mud bricks and rock. Changes in humidity, rainfall and fluctuations between night-time and day-time temperatures are major factors in deterioration of the buildings, and climate change is expected to exacerbate these impacts, according to ICOMOS experts. At other nominated sites, including the historic towns of Kaunas in Lithuania and Kuldīga in Latvia, ICOMOS identified increased flooding due to climate change as a potentially serious threat.  

UCS has been actively advocating for the new climate policy over several years. If agreed on, it would have major implications for the way the World Heritage Convention is implemented. For example, it asks member countries to develop and share mechanisms and methodologies for assessing the climate vulnerability of their World Heritage sites. Crucially, the new policy recognizes the vital importance of integrating Indigenous and traditional knowledge in management plans as a proven strategy for increasing resilience. It also calls for involving local communities, including Indigenous peoples and traditional owners, in site governance to help strengthen climate responses locally. The policy also recommends that all new nominations to the World Heritage list should include an assessment of climate risk to the proposed site—an important innovation proposed by UCS at the expert meeting on the island of Vilm, Germany, which kicked off the climate policy process in 2017. 

A handful of the nominated sites did identify climate change as a threat in their nomination dossiers. At Koutammakou in Benin, the spiritual and cultural landscape of the Batammariba people, climate change is affecting the availability of plants needed for building traditional dwellings as well as putting sacred groves and medicinal plants at risk, while increased heavy rainfall is causing soil erosion and increasingly damaging subsistence farmers’ seasonal crops such as millet.

The proposal for a Highlands of the Mongolian Altai World Heritage site includes the extraordinarily rich tombs of the Iron Age Pazyryk culture, remarkable for the organic materials including wood, fabrics and leather that have been preserved in the permafrost for centuries. Mongolia has experienced unprecedented warming, well above the global average over the last 30 years. Warmer temperatures and thawing permafrost now threaten the contents of many of the tombs with rapid deterioration and decay, and irreparable loss of globally important archaeology. 

Where governments do identify climate change as a vulnerability in their site nominations, there is a much greater chance that the risk will be fully integrated into the management plans required under the convention. For example, in its nomination for a Tr’ondëk-Klondike World Heritage property, Canada identifies the threat from changing river ice conditions, thawing permafrost and increasing risk from wildfires, and describes potential resilience strategies to be implemented. The proposed World Heritage property attests to the relationship of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in’s ancestors’ relationship with the landscape, and the cultural changes resulting from the gold rush and influx of non-Indigenous people, which led to the marginalization, displacement, segregation, and attempted assimilation of the Indigenous people. The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in’ First Nation, local communities including Dawson City, and Canadian state and federal government entities are working collaboratively on climate adaptation planning. 

Action and funding urgently needed

More and more natural and cultural sites are being added to the World Heritage list annually, many of them facing immediate or long-term climate threats to the attributes and values that make them globally important and eligible for World Heritage status. It’s high time that the World Heritage Committee and the rest of the signatories to the Convention center climate change in their deliberations and do more to protect these extraordinary, irreplaceable locations from loss and damage. Placing Venice and the Great Barrier Reef on the list of endangered sites, finalizing the climate policy, and providing dedicated financial resources to the World Heritage Center to fully and effectively implement it, would signal a serious intention to do so. 

To address these issues, the third international Species on the Move conference convened in Bonita Springs, Florida, in May 2023. Key ideas discussed at the meeting included increasing connectivity between protected areas, the need for anticipatory legal and regulatory planning for biodiversity conservation, and reinstituting and protecting Indigenous land and wildlife management practices.

Opening the conference, the director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at York University, Chris Thomas, noted that humans have been modifying ecosystems for millennia, and that every species that survives today, even in the most remote areas, exists in an ecosystem that has been altered by humans, including through changes in atmospheric and ocean chemistry, and climate change. In a world where urbanization, forestry, agriculture, fisheries, transportation, water and energy infrastructure, and other human impacts have degraded and continue to alter natural ecosystems, climate change is causing rapid and often hard to predict impacts on species dynamics and distribution. 

A global shift in species distributions is underway

Hundreds of studies during the last two decades have tracked climate-driven changes in species distribution, including for trees, mammals, birds, amphibians, marine and freshwater fish, and insects. For example, many duck species in the Midwest have been moving further north in the winter and much more frequently over-wintering there rather than migrating south in the fall. The National Audubon Society predicts massive reductions in future climate suitability of habitat for hundreds of North American birds as the climate continues to warm.  

In the Arctic, where the climate is warming at an exceptionally rapid rate, permafrost thaw is causing slumping and subsidence, creating thermokarst lakes and rapidly changing the profile of peatlands which took thousands of years to develop. Shrubby vegetation is spreading into the tundra, allowing animals including moose, beaver, and snowshoe hares, to live there for the first time. 

Beavers are fast colonizing and changing habitat in lowland northwestern Alaska and are expected to spread throughout the area north of the Brooks Range within decades. Where beavers create ponds, permafrost thaw can accelerate locally and create new habitat for species shifting their ranges northward. The Arctic Beaver Observation Network, a group of scientists, Indigenous groups and land managers has been set up to monitor beaver expansion and better understand potential impacts on habitat, fish, and the subsistence lifestyles and health of Alaska Natives. 

A study which analysed over 30,000 range shifts for more than 12,000 terrestrial and marine species found that marine species are outpacing terrestrial species in the race to keep up with global warming. This is most likely partly related the physical obstacles such as roads, cities, and agriculture impeding terrestrial species, as well as their generally greater tolerance for wide temperature ranges.  

A race to keep up with climate change

On land, microclimate–the very specific suite of conditions such as temperature and humidity that each individual organism experiences–can also play a major part in a species’ speed of change. The huge variation in local microclimates probably also partly explains slower than expected shifts in terrestrial species’ distributions. Most species distribution modeling does not include fine-scale microclimate data. Efforts are underway to change this, for instance with the SoilTemp database that has so far compiled 50,000 microclimate time series from across the globe. 

Some marine species also experience boundaries to movement, including ocean currents, thermoclines, and shipping lanes, but they are generally more able to track changes in sea temperatures.  

In the oceans, prolonged periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures are having a major impact. These annual marine heatwaves (MHWs) have increased by 54% during the last century, and eight of the ten worst MHWs have occurred since 2010. MHWs are causing mass die-offs of foundation species such as corals, kelp, and seagrass as well as fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. They’re also associated with the redistribution of commercially important fish species, causing severe economic losses to fisheries in some cases

While research is still scarce on how marine species are changing the depths at which they live in response to warming water temperatures, many changes have been recorded on land, where plants and animals are being pushed up-slope as the climate changes. For example, in Peru’s Cerro de Pantiacolla range, at least 5 mountain-top bird species have gone locally extinct over a 30-year period. Benjamin Freeman, a biologist at Georgia Tech, coined the phrase “escalator to extinction” to describe the threat to mountaintop species which are adapted to cooler conditions and have nowhere to go as the climate becomes too warm. 

Protected areas and connectivity

Because natural habitats worldwide continue to be destroyed and degraded by urban and agricultural development, and unsustainable resource extraction, increasing the amount of wild lands in protected areas is vital for maintaining biodiversity. But protected areas are themselves under threat from rapid climate change, and conservation planners are urgently working to understand and ameliorate the risks.  

Scientists in Table Mountain National Park in South Africa, for example, have focused on identifying the ecological traits that make species particularly vulnerable to climate change, and then developing management strategies for priority species. This approach has found that South Africa’s iconic protea flowers are among those species most at risk, and that 85% of the park’s reptile species, and 67% of its amphibians are highly vulnerable to climate change. 

In Florida’s Everglades National Park, more than a century of drainage and land development have shrunk and degraded the wetlands, disrupting freshwater flows and destroying important habitat. Efforts to restore natural flows of freshwater into the Florida Everglades are helping to slow the incursion of mangroves into this important freshwater ecosystem as sea levels rise. National Park Service scientist Erik Stabenau calls this “fighting water with water”.  

According to Venetia Briggs-Gonzalez, a wildlife biologist at the University of Florida, coastal development, increased salinity and damage to coastal nesting habitat from sea level rise and storms has already shifted the center of gravity for threatened American crocodiles from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf coast of Florida.  

Crocodiles are adaptable and resilient, but they need both freshwater and sandy coastal nesting sites–two resources that are becoming increasingly scarce. Sea level rise and consequent loss of scarce habitats is also an existential threat to several endangered species in Everglades National Park and the Florida Keys which have no new habitat to move into, including Cape Sable seaside sparrow, Key deer and silver rice rat. 

Protected areas tend to contain higher-quality habitat and greater biodiversity than areas outside, but they will not necessarily act as stepping-stones to allow species to move in response to climate change. If there is not enough connectivity between protected areas, they may no longer protect the species they were designed to harbor. 

A study of almost 30,000 protected areas showed 58% would experience a connectivity failure with 2°C of warming. Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal and the U.S.’s Cloud Peak Wilderness would all experience connectivity failures. Other research shows that deforestation and fragmentation has left 62% of tropical forests without enough connectivity to facilitate species shifts. 

The importance of Indigenous knowledge and values 

Conservation managers and scientists often fail to take account of the cultural importance of nature and the fact that for many people, including most Indigenous peoples, the natural world and human culture are inextricably linked. Individual species often play a critically important part in traditions, religions, sacred and seasonal practices, and foodways.  

One review identified 385 culturally important wild species from across the globe. Seventy-eight percent of these species were important for Indigenous or ethnic groups. Indigenous peoples manage or have tenure over 40% of the world’s intact terrestrial ecological landscapes, about a quarter of the globe, but their land rights are constantly under threat or being eroded, and their traditional cultural and governance practices have historically been marginalized or actively repressed. Lands that are actively managed by Indigenous people often have better conservation results than traditional protected areas. 

First Nations in Canada, including the Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation in British Columbia, are working in partnership with scientists to co-develop approaches to marine and coastal conservation which incorporate, or are led by Indigenous knowledge, priorities, and governance strategies.  

Indigenous knowledge holders have long, place-based historical contexts, a deep understanding of natural history, especially in relation to subsistence harvesting and spiritual practices, and fine-scale knowledge of local climate and seasonal variability.  

Diverse Indigenous peoples have managed Pacific salmon for thousands of years, developing complex socio-cultural systems that include traditional laws, harvesting practices, and spiritual beliefs. European settler-colonists deliberately disrupted these systems in the territories now known as the United States and Canada. The ongoing effects of these histories of colonization now interface with modern climate change. 

Today, there are efforts to revitalize traditional fisheries management practices to strengthen food system sustainability and increase resilience to environmental changes, including climate change. The Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation embody a conservation ethic in their everyday life and worldview, and this is reflected in tribal laws and the responsibilities of hereditary chiefs. In 2022, the Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation declared a first-of-its-kind Indigenous Marine Protected Area (MPA) centered on Kitasu Bay. The new MPA will be managed by the Nation and Indigenous guardians will be recognized by the federal government as having park ranger authority. 

What are the paths forward?

With species on the move, ecosystems being re-shaped, we need to start looking more critically at adaptation and resilience options. When species do shift distribution, they do so at different speeds and often in different directions, so species assemblages are changing. Greater connectivity between terrestrial protected areas and other intact ecological systems is vital to facilitating species movements.  

Assisted migration or species translocations may become necessary in some situations, but what are the ethical and regulatory considerations of doing this, and what might the unintended consequences be? Are there mechanical adaptive strategies than can be adopted, for example manipulating microclimate by providing artificial shade and shelter for birds at risk of heat stress in places such as the Mojave Desert, or as is already being tested by WWF and South African National Parks in dry karoo habitats? 

Kent Redford, in his book Strange Natures, has addressed the fast-developing field of synthetic biology and its potential to provide conservation solutions in a changing climate. Projects are already underway to use genetic engineering to eradicate rats on important seabird islands, prevent the up-slope spread of avian malaria to protect mountain birds in Hawaii, and increase genetic diversity in populations of endangered species, such as black-footed ferrets. These approaches come with significant legal and ethical questions that have not yet been fully examined. 

At the conference, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) law professor Robin Kundis Craig called for anticipatory adaptation policy planning. For example, as threatened or endangered species move from current protected areas, it will be important to put in place protective legislation or regulations in the areas they will likely move to, which sometimes will be in different countries.  

To accommodate and facilitate climate-driven species shifts on land and at sea we will need to address fisheries regulations, designation of shipping lanes, aquaculture and invasive species controls, species translocation protocols, and many other regulatory and legal regimes. 

We have already entered an ecological world that we haven’t known before. Human influence on ecosystems has been ongoing for millennia, but the changes over the last 500 years stemming from colonialism and empire-building, industrialization, agricultural expansion, species translocations and introductions, natural resource exploitation, infrastructure development, armed conflict, and tourism, have been completely transformative. Now we are dealing with rapid climate change too.

Species are moving and reorganizing across the globe’s disappearing and highly fragmented ecosystems at a time when the socio-ecological systems, and Indigenous and traditional knowledge and management practices that have underpinned ecological stability for millennia are endangered, under extreme pressure or degrading. With species actively and unpredictably on the move, we need to anticipate and plan for change, to be able to conserve biodiversity, ecosystems services and eco-cultural systems. 

Cultural heritage impacts underestimated

The lack of attention cultural heritage has been given has resulted in a global imbalance in fully understanding the impacts of climate change. In turn, this has led to an incomplete understanding of non-economic losses and damages. Furthermore, climate responses, both practical and political, are viewed and acted upon through a cultural lense. The way in which people perceive, understand and react to climate impacts is modulated in complex ways by culture and heritage. Understanding what people value and prioritize in their own cultural contexts can be a powerful factor in designing and implementing effective strategies to rein in harmful heat-trapping emissions and help communities adapt to unavoidable impacts.

The IPCC found that the lack of a comprehensive and balanced understanding of cultural heritage in climate risk assessments has been exacerbated by an over-representation of built heritage and well-known sites in climate and heritage policy discusions. Heritage consists not just of tangible assets such as buildings, monuments, archaeological sites, art and museums, but also intangible heritage. This heritage, passed down and developed through generations over decades to millennia, can include practices, food traditions, languages, skills, ceremonies, artistic expression, cosmologies, identities and ways of knowing. Such intangible heritage often resides in communities that have historically been marginalized, discriminated against or actively persecuted – those that are also often the most vulnerable to climate change.

Traditional resilience practices of the past can strengthen resilience today

Much of this threatened and vulnerable intangible heritage offers opportunities for learning from climate adaptation in the past and increasing resilience in the future. For example, pastoral systems used by nomadic people in Africa, who follow or herd their livestock to suitable open grazing land, developed as effective responses to natural aridification of much of the continent thousands of years ago. Ancient water access and management practices have a great deal to contribute today too. Complex irrigation systems such as the acequia of Spain and New Mexico, the aflaj of Oman, and those in Peru’s Nor Yauyos Cochos preserve and Honghe Hani rice terraces in China’s Yunnan province have enabled dryland and mountain agriculture for centuries to millennia. In Nepal the system of underground piped water and public fountains (hiti) originating in the 6th century provide access to water for a large proportion of the population throughout the Kathmandu Valley.

The IPCC report centers the importance of acknowledging different ways of knowing and the diverse knowledge systems at play for understanding, measuring, monitoring and recording. Seasonal phenomena, for example are important for triggering or celebrating agricultural, fishing or hunting activities in many Indigenous peoples’ annual calendars, often accompanied by ceremonies. In Oregon, the Siletz people use the emergence of eel ants (flying termites) and other environmental signals to trigger their Pacific lamprey harvest and simultaneously the traditional eel dance. With changes in the climate, come changes in seasons, phenology (seasonal biological changes directly linked to climatic conditions), disconnection of historically-related ecological phenomena and alterations in species distribution. For Native Alaskan Iñupiat, bowhead whale-hunting and the spring whaling festival have been integral to community identity for thousands of years, but climate changes to the Arctic marine environment are threatening that.

Indigenous knowledge should be highly valued

Often Indigenous and local communities are the first to notice changes in ecological phenomena as their detailed traditional knowledge of local species interactions and weather have been built over many generations of observation and cultural interaction. The three primary types of knowledge – scientific, Indigenous and local – should not be merged into a single hybrid system, but should be used alongside one another in a “braided” system of knowledge to gain the full benefit of the different systems and perspectives.

Indigenous knowledge has too often been absorbed and integrated into science-based climate impact and adaptation strategies, without the full participation of the knowledge holders themselves. The same is true at the decision-making and political levels, where Indigenous and local communities have not had the platform to speak for themselves, rather than mediated through the voices of others. More often than not, they have not been provided access to decision-making and climate action planning, and adaptation plans are the poorer for it – missing key knowledge, insights and practice toolkits. Traditional knowledge has also been cherry-picked or appropriated and the IPCC makes clear that:

“When in pursuit of collaborative research/work between knowledge systems it is critical to be clear on data-sharing and benefit-sharing agreements so that IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) are maintained, consent is transparent and groups (e.g. Indigenous people and local communities) are not disadvantaged in any way by giving or having their knowledge used, misused or abused”.

There are a growing number of examples of successful climate resilience projects where solutions have been co-created and are being jointly implemented by management agencies and Indigenous and local communities. In the Kakadu National Park World Heritage site in Australia’s Northern Territory, Aboriginal co-researchers and Indigenous rangers are working with the national science agency CSIRO, the park management board and other partners to improve decision-making for management of important species on Indigenous lands in a changing climate.

In California, efforts are underway with scientists and traditional knowledge holders to understand how Indigenous heritage developed over centuries in the management of oak forests, including sacred groves, as traditional fire and acorn collection and processing practices can underpin adaptive fire management strategies and resilience to drought in a rapidly changing climate.

L&D discussions must include intangible heritage

At COP27 and beyond, it is crucial that more attention is given to loss and damage (L&D) of intangible cultural heritage. Until now, because it cannot easily or effectively be given an economic value, cultural loss and damage has been largely ignored in political L&D discussions, which have overwhelmingly been centered on calls for direct climate financing to be provided by richer nations such as the US and Europe that have been historically responsible for most carbon emissions. Climate finance to help low income countries in the Global South to respond to worsening climatic conditions is critical. An analysis by the Heinrich Böll Foundation has advocated that by 2030, the richer nations should have developed mechanisms to contribute $150 billion to offset loss and damage in the Global South. Even this is a drop in the bucket. By 2050, the Böll Foundation analysis estimates losses and damages from climate change will reach at least $1 trillion-$1.8 trillion, and this is without putting any kind of value on the massive world-wide degradation to cultural heritage of all types.

At the very least, we need to create a new climate science research agenda for cultural heritage which centers Indigenous and local knowledge and resilience strategies based on traditional practices. We also urgently need to initiate discussions on the potential benefits of valuing intangible heritage in order to be able to better represent the true costs of loss and damage.

The new IPCC/UNESCO/ICOMOS report has highlighted the potential harm caused, especially to Indigenous people and historically marginalized communities, by underestimating climate impacts on cultural heritage and undervaluing non-scientific knowledge systems. It also demonstrates the resilience benefits that could be gained from redressing the balance. COP27 offers a turning point at which rich nations commit to providing adequate L&D financing, but also at which all countries move towards providing equal weight and attention to non-economic L&D, including intangible cultural heritage.

Climate change is probably the fastest-growing threat to African cultural heritage, much of which was left in a parlous position because of the legacies and structural inequalities of past colonial rule. During the colonial era, Africa’s moveable heritage was stripped, stolen and often violently acquired and taken to Europe and the US. One amongst many depredations was the looting of hundreds of exquisite bronzes made by Edo craftsmen from the 16^th century onwards which were taken by the British army when it sacked Benin City (now in southern Nigeria) in 1897. More than 1400 of these Benin bronzes can be viewed in museums from London to San Francisco, Washington and New York, but hardly any are in Nigerian museums.

Western museums continue to resist calls to return Africa’s stolen heritage. In 2018 the Sarr/Savoy report on the restitution of African Heritage estimated that 90-95 percent of African objects held in museums are outside Africa. Meanwhile, heritage management in most African nations remains critically under-resourced, and climate change will only make matters worse. That’s why UCS is joining international partners in a pilot project to help train African heritage experts to assess climate impact risks to World Heritage sites and develop resilient site management strategies.

The Climate Vulnerability Africa (CVI) Project, is being launched to address the gap that exists in understanding climate impacts on cultural heritage in Africa and to help build capacity amongst the continent’s heritage professionals. The CVI—a rapid climate impact assessment tool designed for World Heritage sites—was created by scientists from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.  UCS contributed to the development of the CVI and helped test the methodology in Scotland. Now, in a project coordinated by the African World Heritage Fund, ICOMOS and Queens University, Belfast, the CVI will also be used at sites in Nigeria and Tanzania. 

Climate change in Africa 

Climate change is a major threat to Africa, but its impacts will be quite variable in this huge and diverse continent which includes Mediterranean coasts, vast deserts, tropical forests, savannahs and wetlands, mountain glaciers and even sub-Antarctic islands. According to the IPCC, temperatures have already increased by about 0.5°C during the last 50-100 years in most of the continent.

Marked changes in precipitation patterns are likely for much of Africa. For example, reduced precipitation is likely in northern Africa and southwestern South Africa, but in some areas, such as the Ethiopian Highlands, there may be more rainfall and more extreme rainfall events. Warming is causing glaciers to recede in the Rwenzori Mountains, and Mount Kilimanjaro with significant ice loss expected from further warming. Sea level rise is impacting cities including Alexandria in Egypt and Saint-Louis in Senegal.

Desertification may be exacerbated by climate change, droughts are likely to become more severe, and dangerous heatwaves are expected to increase disproportionately in some regions. Countries south of the equator are expected to experience the highest mean sea level rise and the IPCC has identified Africa’s coastal fisheries, coral reefs and mangroves as at major risk from warming, as well as traditional pastoral agricultural systems.  

Past and projected temperature changes for africa. The top of the right hand panel shows increase of temperature if we do not meet the Paris Agreement targets. Source: IPCC AR5 (2014) WG2 Figure 22:1.

Climate and cultural heritage  

All these changes threaten cultural heritage in Africa, including the tangible—such as historic buildings, archaeological sites and museum collections— and the intangible, including seasonal festivals, sacred sites and traditional fishing practices and foodways. To take just one example, the water levels of Lake Malawi have dropped in recent decades and rainfall there has become more unpredictable with longer drier periods and more extreme weather events, putting at risk traditional fishing practices that rely on some of the highest freshwater fish biodiversity on the planet. 

In a 2016 report produced jointly with UNESCO, UCS identified drier conditions and increased frequency of large fires in the Cape region of South Africa as being likely to impact not only the extraordinary plant diversity of the area, but also shrink the zone in which wild rooibos (redbush tea) can be collected. Meanwhile, the ancient Ksour (medieval desert caravan towns) of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata in Mauritania, once globally important centers of nomadic and Islamic culture, are at risk from extreme heat damaging ancient masonry and extreme rainfall eroding traditional earth-built architecture. 

Traditional crops and foodways may be disrupted or lost as a result of climate change. Bananas may have been cultivated for more than 4,000 years in Uganda. Photo: Adam Markham.

Sea level rise is already at crisis point for many African nations. Half of Bénin’s population resides in the coastal city of Cotonou on the Gulf of Guinea, where coastal inundation threatens traditional boatbuilding and fishing practices and sea level rise may force many people to relocate. The Island of Gorée in Senegal, and its historic buildings memorializing the Atlantic trade in enslaved persons is at immediate risk from sea-level rise.

In East Africa, many important low-lying coastal heritage sites built on coral or mud, such as Ibo Island in Mozambique, Shanga Island in Kenya and Suakin in Sudan are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and inundation. The Roman ruins at Sabratha and Leptis Magna on the coast of Libya in North Africa have been identified along with dozens of other coastal archaeological and historic sites in the Mediterranean region as at risk from coastal erosion and flooding. Changed humidity and rainfall patterns including flash floods are of growing concern for archaeological sites in Egypt too.

As the cradle of humanity Africa has some of the oldest and most important rock art in the world, and across the continent much of it is extremely vulnerable to climate changes. Increases in temperatures and reductions in cloud cover (predicted for parts of north and west Africa) will increase heat stress and accelerate physical and chemical weathering of pigments. More humid conditions could increase damaging biological growth such as microbes, mold and lichens which can rapidly degrade rock art. 

Climate resilience capacity building

Not nearly enough is yet known about the current and potential impacts of climate change on heritage in Africa, including at the 137 UNESCO-designated World Heritage sites. For this reason, the CVI Africa project will undertake assessments at two sites. One is Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania where the sea level rise in the Indian Ocean and increasingly intense storm activity is causing erosion, flooding and damage to archaeology. The other is Nigeria’s Sukur Cultural Landscape which according to the African World Heritage Centre “is threatened by changing rainfall patterns, windstorms and reduced vegetation cover, which is impacting agricultural production and the availability of culturally significant traditional building material.”

Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani, an important Islamic Indian Ocean port and center for gold, silver, ivory, pottery, porcelain and pearl trading from the 9th through the 18th century. Photo: Will Megarry.

Crucial for improving understanding of climate threats to heritage in Africa and managing for resilience and adaptation is building capacity amongst heritage professionals and World Heritage site managers. ‘despite the  intensifying threat, there remains a lack of attention to the cultural dimensions of climate change,” says Dr. Albino Jopela of the African World Heritage Fund, “and this is especially true across the African continent.”

To address this gap, the CVI Africa project is developing an online training course. The first cohort of six competitively chosen trainees from Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tunisia and the Atlantic archipelago of Cabo Verde will participate in the course starting on Africa Day 2021. As part of the course, I’m excited to discuss virtually with the trainees the most important climate vulnerabilities for cultural heritage in Africa, and my close colleague, UCS’s director of climate science, Brenda Ekwurzel, will be delivering live teaching content on climate science and the latest IPCC findings. 

Summing up the importance of the new CVI Africa project, Dr. Ishanlosen Odiaua of ICOMOS Nigeria has said “Supporting local communities and national authorities to develop tools that build on local experience and realities, can help them manage these risks and plan for the future. We hope that the CVI can contribute to fulfilling that need.” UCS is thrilled to be involved in this important work. 

The Theodore Roosevelt statue at the American Museum of Natural History. Photo: Wikimediacommons/edwardhblake.

The statue at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has been the subject of protests for decades, most recently by the activists of the Monuments Removal Brigade and Decolonize This Place. Commissioned in 1925 and unveiled in 1940, the statue shows Roosevelt mounted on a horse, towering above and slightly forward from, a walking Native American to his right and a Black African, eyes down, to his left, both seemingly bearing Roosevelt’s rifles like servants. It is a clearly racist representation of white superiority and a celebration of colonialism, two causes that Roosevelt did much to advance. In 2019, the museum tried to tackle this highly problematic statue by creating a special exhibit, “Addressing the Statue” which explored the issues of symbolism and representation. The eventual decision to request removal of the statue seems inevitable in hindsight, with the Museum’s attempt to explain and contextualize the statue proving to be an inadequate response to criticism.

AMNH has generally been slow in its response to growing calls for the decolonization of museums. Unlike Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, for example, its website does not yet even include an acknowledgement of being built on traditional Native American lands settled by white colonizers. Other museums, such as the San Diego Museum of Man are implementing ambitious plans for decolonisation, including hiring a director of decolonization, instituting a policy of not displaying human remains without the consent of descendent communities, and comprehesively working to change the language used in exhibits and marketing.

AMNH has not properly publicly addressed its difficult history with scientific racism and colonial practices. Collections were amassed through museum-sponsored expeditions all over the world during a period of intense colonial expansion and consolidation from the 1880s through the 1930s. Anthropological collecting was often highly competitive in the US and AMNH was in competition with the Columbian Museum (now the Field Museum) in Chicago, among others. “At the present time they have at least 27 [totem] poles and we have 23 in Chicago” wrote the Columbian’s director George Dorsey in 1897, “I do not like to have the difference in number remain against us.”

Anthropologists Emily Martin and Susan Harding have noted that AMNH’s cultural halls, most of which have not been updated since the 1960s or ’70s present a view of non-western societies that ignores or erases the colonial contexts of the material and cultures on display. In a 2016 article in Anthropology Now, they say, “the institution continues to work within an ahistorical salvage paradigm of so-called disappearing primitive cultures that both obscures its colonial history and re-inscribes it for five million visitors each year. Half of them are children”.

Cultures frozen in time

The creation of the Hall of African Peoples in 1968 – which has hardly been altered in the 50 years since – epitomized the romanticization of African villagers frozen in time, supposedly in harmony with their environments, whilst failing to recognize either the great African civilizations of the past or post-colonial history and modernization. As Monique Scott, Director of Museum Studies at Bryn Mawr College, wrote in Anthropology News in 2019, “Egyptian pyramids are elevated to the MET [Metropolitan Museum of Art] across Central Park to share space with other great civilizations; but sub-Saharan African people are confined to the “Heart of Darkness” jungles and plains, alongside the great African animals…Museum representations of Africa and anthropological representations of Black bodies matter, because Black lives matter.”

One hall which is finally undergoing a major revision and restoration is the century-old Northwest Coast Hall. The museum holds the world’s largest collection of Northwestern North American Native art and artifacts. Its expeditions to Washington, British Columbia (BC) and Siberia studied Indigenous customs, sometimes misunderstanding or misinterpreting them and acquired artifacts, including by buying and stealing human remains.

Who do the collections belong to?

Yuquot whalers’ shrine, Vancouver Island, 1904. Photo: George Hunt.

In 1904 Kwakiutl-English ethnologist George Hunt, collecting for AMNH’s Franz Boas, obtained an extraordinary centuries-old whalers’ shrine from Yuquot on Vancouver Island, BC. It consists of 92 carved wooden figures of people and animals, several human skulls and a basic wooden shelter. Access was only for chiefs and the shrine is believed to have been used for cleansing rituals in preparation for whaling expeditions. The shrine was purchased under shady circumstances in 1904 and taken from Nuu-chah-nulth land in British Columbia when the local people were away seal-hunting. The shrine was never exhibited at AMNH and remains in storage. Since 1983, First Nation elders have been advocating for the shrine’s return to Yuquot. In 2018 AMNH curator Stephen Whitely told the Globe and Mail  “We know that that’s a sensitive item and we continue to be open to discussions about that with the Nuu-chah-nulth, with the Muchalaht”. This response is typical of museums internationally with the negotiating power of possession and is being used to slow down or negate calls for the repatriation of everything from the Elgin Marbles to the Benin Bronzes. AMNH does, however, remain active in negotiating some returns and hundreds of human remains have been repatriated to Indigenous communities, including to the Haida and Tseycum nations and to Māori descendent communities in New Zealand.

Carl Akeley, gorillas & the racist roots of wildlife conservation

Carl Akeley (center) with the body of one of five mountain gorillas shot in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1921 for display in the American Museum of Natural History. Photo: AMNH.

AMNH was at the forefront of the creation of lifelike dioramas in its regional animal halls in the early 20^thcentury, not least through the work of taxidermist and sculptor Carl Akeley. The animals displayed were generally acquired through hunting expeditions in European colonies. Akeley himself killed hundreds of animals on Field Museum and AMNH trips to Africa (Akeley Gorilla photo), including 5 gorillas in 1921, four of which are on display today. Akeley has been credited with helping create the world’s first gorilla preserve in the Virunga Mountains of the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) whis now a UNESCO World Heritage site but there was a strong element of racism and the search for the evolutionary “missing link” in his African expedition of 1921 according to University of Nebraska historian Jeannette Eileen Jones.

Akeley himself regarded Africans as “savage” and irrational and as the cousins of gorillas rather than the equal of whites. To conserve dwindling gorilla populations, he advocated for “reservations” equating the threatened great apes to the “disappearing” Native American tribes in the U.S. At a time of colonial exploitation of Congo and other African nations, the “great white hunter” Akeley, who typically traveled with 40 or so African bearers, trackers and workers, helped create and perpetuate the paternalistic view that only white colonialists could protect and save threatened species. A worldview in which much of today’s wildlife conservation movement has its roots.

Henry Fairfield Osborn’s 25 years of supporting eugenics at AMNH

It is difficult to find any substantive discussion on AMNH’s website of the racist and colonialist views and practices that shaped the collection of artifacts and display designs that millions of 20^th and 21^st century schoolchildren and tourists have absorbed there. Using the search term “eugenics” reveals nothing relevant, certainly not the museum’s hosting of the 2^nd and 3^rd International Eugenics conferences in 1921 and 1932 respectively (photo of conference exhibition), during the 25 years of Henry Fairfield Osborn’s directorship. In 1918, Osborn, whose bust is still on display at the museum, had also been a founder of the eugenics-promoting Galton Society along with Madison Grant and Charles Davenport (founder of the Eugenics Record Office). Search the AMNH website for Osborn himself and again you will be out of luck unless you only want read of his contributions to paleontology. Osborn hosted and presided over the 2^nd International Eugenics Conference and he was an enthusiastic supporter of race-based immigration restrictions and forced sterilization programs. He visited Germany in the 1930s to see how their eugenic sterilization laws worked and in 1934 wrote a series of letters in which he expressed his admiration for the Hindenberg-Hitler government and its “bright future”, admitting that his views were “not shared by the majority of my countrymen”.

Glass slide depicting the evolutionary progression from “fish to man”, with an Indigenous Australian depicted as a “rung below” the idealized white man. Photo: AMNH.

Osborn believed that whites, specifically those of the Nordic “race” – who were courageous, war-like and hardy – were superior to all others. He thought that “Negroids” had been kept in a state of “arrested brain development” likely because “at the Equator the quest for food is very easy and requires relatively little intelligence.” In a 1926 article in Natural History magazine he wrote that “the standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the 11 year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens”. All views with no scientific basis whatever.

When his friend, AMNH trustee, Madison Grant published two extraordinarily racist books in 1916 and 1933, Osborn provided gushingly enthusiastic introductions. The first book, “Passing of the Great Race” described white superiority over “negroids, mongoloids and Mediterraneans” and was translated into German in 1925. According to evidence at the Nuremberg trial of Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt, the book was Hitler’s “bible”. In it Grant wrote that “mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

Seventeen years later when Grant published “The Conquest of a Continent or the Expansion of Races in America,” the New York Times’ book review noted that Osborn “has taken the greatest pleasure in endorsing a book, which, whatever its historic or scientific merits, is about the most uncompromising and aggressive plea for the maintenance of a Nordic and Protestant America, racially and nationally pure and undefiled, that has ever found its way into print”. The book advocated purging “alien elements” in America, banning mixed marriages and implementing racially-based barriers and quotas for immigration. Osborn’s introduction called for protecting a “precious heritage which we should not impair or dilute.” Osborn and Grant’s views were reinforced by a 1932 exhibit at the museum – “ The Face from Fish to Man” – which placed a sculpted head of an Indigenous Australian between an ape and “modern” man (represented by a Greek sculpture of Adonis). The display could not have been clearer in promoting the idea of the superiority of the white race.

Coming to terms with history

Like all natural history museums found in the 19^th century, AMNH needs to fully come to terms with its historic entanglements with colonialism and racism. This it has been slow to do, especially in regard to its long period under Henry Fairfield Osborn’s leadership when the museum actively promoted white supremacist views through its exhibits, dioramas, murals, science and collecting, as well as by hosting two international eugenics conferences and exhibitions.

Participants at the 3rd International Eugenics Congress at the American Museum of Natural History, August 1932. Photo source: Exhibiting eugenics: response and resistance to a hidden history, Brave & Sylva, 2007.

Despite the wave of decolonization policies and practices that has spilled through the museum world globally in recent years, AMNH has appeared slow to adapt and reluctant to discuss the more problematiuc elements of its history. The 2019 exhibit on the Roosevelt statue and a recent re-interpretation of a diorama depicting an imagined meeting between 17^th century Dutch colonists and Indigenous Lenape people have been small steps in the right direction. Meanwhile AMNH’s annual Margaret Mead Film Festival has offered a valuable perspective on decolonization of anthropology which is not yet evident in the exhibits of its culture halls.  It is to be hoped that the reorganization of the Northwest Coast Hall and engagement and involvement of the Indigenous peoples whose cultural knowledge, stories, artifacts and art were bought, stolen and appropriated by outsiders, will also contribute to the museum’s decolonization process.

However, for now, decades-old dioramas continue to reinforce paternalistic colonial tropes, negotiations about repatriation of sacred and stolen artifacts are slow and the Museum is not publicly engaging with its role in the American eugenics movement. This  iconic and important scientific and educational institution is in danger of being held up as an example of the broader failure of the museum world to comprehensively embrace decolonization at a structural level.

To take just one example, the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Environmental Studies is housed in Hayden Hall, named after Ferdinand Hayden, a geologist famous for his explorations of Yellowstone but who described Native Americans as “savages” and Wyoming as “infested with hostile Indians.” He advocated for U.S. expansionism to include the whole of North and Central America “from the Arctic Circle to the Isthmus of Darien” and promoted and helped enable White settlement of the West.  His 1871 US Geological Survey of Wyoming stated that unless Indians “are localized and made to enter upon agricultural pursuits they must ultimately be exterminated.” More than 40 topographic features are named after Hayden, and efforts are underway by Indigenous activists to rename the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park as Buffalo Nations Valley.

Universities have been slow to respond

The history of science is shot through with racism. Ethnology, anthropology, paleontology, archaeology and zoology have all served to support racist theories, doctrines and policies, as have chemistry, medicine, genetics, mathematics and economics. Many scientists who made pioneering advances or whose achievements underpin scientific progress and thinking today held and actively promoted racist views. In their time they were celebrated and honored as important or even great scientists but today it is important that we address their roles in building and perpetuating racist stereotypes, structures and institutions.

University leaders who have been slow to respond to and act upon the legacy of slavery and slave-holding in their histories have been even slower to address the history of racism in science. It was not until 2018 for example, that the University of Pittsburgh stripped Thomas Parran’s name from its Graduate School of Public Health. As US Surgeon General from 1938 to 1946, Parran oversaw the infamous Tuskegee biomedical experiment in which treatment for syphilis was withheld from hundreds of Black share-croppers in Alabama who were tricked into participating in the study. He also approved unethical experiments in Guatemala, where female sex workers, prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers were unknowingly infected with syphilis or gonorrhea.

In recent months, as the brutal police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others sparked unprecedented nationwide protests and support for the Black Lives Matter movement, calls for action to address racist memorialization on campuses have increased. In June, after resisting years of pressure, the University of Southern California finally took the name of Rufus von KleinSmid–a eugenicist who supported forced sterilization–off the Center for International and Public Affairs building, which had been named for the former university president. At the University of Maine, however, Little Hall still remains named after former university president and eugenicist Clarence Cook Little who supported laws to limit immigration based on race and to prevent mixed-race marriages.

Francis Galton’s disturbing legacy

Eugenics is a major thread weaving through scientific racism. Alexander Graham Bell, H.G. Wells and Marie Stopes were all supporters. Francis Galton, the polymath English scientist & statistician coined the term, meaning “well-bred,” in 1883. Galton advocated the selective breeding of humans to produce a superior race. Eugenics built on Mendelian studies of heredity and Darwinian notions of fitness and extended the principles of plant and animal breeding to humans, with its proponents seeing it as a way to weed out a broad range of “undesirable” traits including mental and physical disabilities and racial inferiority.

Photo of Sir Francis Galton taken at Alphonse Bertillon’s Criminal Identification Laboratory in Paris in 1893.

The roots of some statistical techniques lie in the efforts of Galton and other eugenicists to help prove their racial gene theories. Eminent statistician Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was the founder of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society. Rothamstead Research, the UK agricultural science laboratory where he worked for many years has recently renamed its accommodation block, Fisher Court to AnoVa Court, and the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies retired the R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship in June 2020 after 56 years. Freshman statistics students at University College of London (UCL) always had their lectures in the Galton Theatre until it was finally stripped of the name in June 2020. However, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge has yet to remove a stained glass window that honors him and has recently been a target of anti-racist activists.

The dark shadow of eugenics

Eugenics was widely embraced in the U.S. scientific and political establishments, and the dean of Harvard Medical school, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an early promoter of it. Holmes believed “Boston Brahmins”–the White elite of Boston–to have hereditary and superior bloodlines.

Harvard students, faculty and alumni are now calling for the renaming of the Holmes Society of the university’s medical and dental schools. In 1927, Holmes’ son, the former Harvard law professor and Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the court’s opinion in Buck v Bell which, with the infamous words, “three generations of imbeciles is enough” upheld the right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize a woman regarded as feeble-minded (she wasn’t) and opening the floodgates to state laws allowing sterilization.

Charles Davenport created the member-based Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910 and Stanford’s David Starr Jordan was the group’s first chair. It received funding and institutional support from philanthropist Mrs. E. H. Harrington, John Harvey Kellogg, the Carnegie Institution and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Davenport provided expert testimony for The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 which used eugenic arguments to restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. By 1931, 28 US states had sterilization laws and by 1936 at least 60,000 forced sterilizations had been performed, mostly on poor Black people. The Carnegie Institution eventually concluded that there was no scientific merit in eugenics and withdrew funding in 1939.

The U.S. eugenics movement helped to provide the intellectual underpinning for Nazi racial theories and sterilization policies. In Germany, Nazis lauded the success of California’s sterilization laws and used them as a model for their own legislation in 1933. Even after the full horror of the Nazi sterilization programs and extermination camps was uncovered, eugenic ideas maintained a grip in the mainstream scientific community. For example Nobel Prize winning geneticists Francis Crick and James Watson both believed that Black people are genetically inferior, and Crick was an advocate of sterilization.

Roots of scientific racism

Decades before eugenics took hold in the U.S., scientific racism had already been firmly established and many of its founders are still memorialized on campuses today.

Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (CMZ) and one the first “celebrity scientists” was a leading polygenist, believing that several human races were  created separately according to their climate and geography and that the White European race was superior to all others. Agassiz was inspired by the anthropologist Samuel George Morton who used craniology–the measurement of brain capacity in the skull–to try to demonstrate that Caucasians were racially superior.

A statue of Louis Agassiz (left) who believed Black people were an inferior race stands above the entrance to a Stanford University hall named after the eugenicist David Starr Jordan. Scientist and abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt (right) argued that there were no biological different races. Photo: Creative Commons/Dicklyon.

Morton collected and measured hundreds of skulls and proposed that there were five biologically distinct races to which he assigned immutable character traits that he derived from, among other things, reading travel literature. Despite being shot through with biases and distortions and lacking any shred of scientific merit, Morton’s work was nevertheless widely accepted in the scientific community. It provided credibility for arguments in defense of slavery, segregation, and the dispossession and killing of Native Americans.

A statue of Agassiz has stood for more than 100 years over the entrance to Stanford University Psychology Department’s Jordan Hall. The hall itself is named after David Starr Jordan, Stanford’s founding president, an ichthyologist and prominent eugenicist. Stanford is currently reviewing a request from faculty and students to remove the statue and change the name of the hall.

The Confederate surgeon who popularized scientific racism

In another egregious example of campus memorialization, the honors college building of the University of Alabama is named in honor of one of the most influential scientific racists of the 19^th century. Josiah C. Nott was a surgeon, anthropologist, founder of the University of Alabama School of Medicine and a slaveholder.

He was a polygenist, who believed that if Black and White races mixed, it would lead to extinction through degeneration, and thought Black people to be “the lowest point in the scale of human beings.” In 1854, with the British Egyptologist George Gliddon he published the book Types of Mankind.

It sold three and a half thousand copies in the first four months and ran to ten printings over 17 years. Scientific “proof” of the inferiority of Black people was just what the slaveholders of the South were looking for. Frederick Douglass in his commencement address at Western Reserve College in 1854 said that of all the efforts “to disprove the unity of the human family, and to brand the Negro with natural inferiority, the most compendious and barefaced is the book, entitled Types of Mankind.”

Robert A. Smith of Pittsburg State University argues that Types of Mankind “fixed the issue of ‘race’ in the minds of everyday Americans. The concept of ‘race’ had been isolated, identified, and finally popularized. The mere fact that we consider race to be an issue at all in the twenty-first century is due in no small measure to Nott and Gliddon’s efforts in the nineteenth.” And yet still Nott’s name remains attached to a building at the University of Alabama (UA).

Nott Hall at the University of Alabama, named to honor Josiah Nott in 1922. Photo: courtesy of Hilary Green.

In her ongoing Hallowed Grounds Project, Dr. Hilary N. Green, a UA historian, highlights a vilely racist and incandescently angry 17-page letter from Nott– “the greatest living anthropologist of America” –to O. O. Howard, head of the post-war Freedman’s Bureau, that was published in the July 1866 issue of the Popular Magazine of Anthropology. In it, Nott claimed that “History proves indisputably, that a superior and inferior race cannot live together practically on any other terms than that of master and slave, and that the inferior race, like the Indians, must be expelled or exterminated. In every climate where the White man can live and prosper, he drives all others before him.”

Nott soon joined the ranks of what historian Daniel Sutherland has termed the Confederate Carpetbaggers, who moved to the Northern states seeking to regain their wealth and status. In New York he became president of the New York Obstetrical Society and a close friend of J. Marion Sims, sometimes referred to as the father of gynecology. Sims is known for his experiments on enslaved women without the use of anesthesia. After years of protests, his statue was eventually removed from New York’s Central Park in 2018. But monuments to Sims still stand on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse and the Alabama state capitol.

Removing names and statues won’t end racism, but it’s the right thing to do

History is an ongoing effort to understand the past, and heritage is the range of cultures, traditions, buildings, monuments and objects we inherit and pass on to future generations. Both are dynamic and constantly undergoing interpretation, with heritage demanding choices about what is important, to whom and why. Removing or re-contextualizing a monument, changing the name of a building, or taking a portrait off a wall does not erase history as some have argued, but it can reflect a better understanding of past events and motivations, new societal norms, or the values of local or affected communities. Some say that re-naming structures only facilitates forgetting about the past and that what is needed is an explanatory plaque instead, but why should a BIPOC student be forced to be reminded of Louis Agassiz or John Nott’s abhorrent views whenever they walk by or enter a particular campus building?

There are many ways to unwrap, interpret, teach and remember the complex histories of science and race in universities without maintaining honors and monuments that were bestowed or created many decades ago, not infrequently to uphold and celebrate a racist worldview or create an implicitly White space on campus. In some cases there may be an opportunity to leave a monument or an artwork and create a powerful new one beside it to catalyze reflection and discussion. Such an approach was tried in 2018 at the University of Kentucky, where Black artist Karyn Olivier was asked to create an artwork in dialogue with a controversial 1934 New Deal era mural in its Memorial Hall. In June, however, the university announced that it will remove the original mural, despite the fact that doing so removes the context for Olivier’s responsive work and will silence a contemporary Black voice.

An anti-racist reassessment of whose stories get told and how, is urgently needed on U.S. campuses. Scientists whose views promoted and legitimized genocide, slavery, segregation, forced sterilization, race-based immigration restrictions and structural inequality should no longer be memorialized.

There are many ways that the scientific community must reckon with the harm it has caused through its history and present complicity in racist actions. Removing names from buildings or busts from hallways won’t bring an end to systemic and institutional racism in universities, but it is an essential part of the process. And it cannot wait.

N.B. An excellent reading list of decolonizing science resources has been prepared by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Kit Mead has a good eugenics reading list. 

Dr. Alistair Rennie from Scottish Natural Heritage and the Dynamic Coast project explains the processes of accelerated coastal erosion at Skara Brae, Orkney, to CVI workshop participants. Photo: Adam Markham

More than 5000 years old and one of the best preserved Neolithic site in Europe, Skara Brae is part of a World Heritage property that also includes the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and the Maeshowe chamber tomb – known for its alignment with the sun’s rays at the Winter Solstice and its Viking graffiti. These spectacular places are on the Orkney Islands – an archipelago just a few miles off the north coast of mainland Scotland, famed for its extraordinary density of archaeological sites.

More than 3,000 archaeological sites have been identified so far on Orkney, and a survey carried out by the SCAPE Trust found at least a third of them to be already damaged by coastal erosion or at risk of being so. Whole classes of types of site, for example Iron Age Brochs (defended stone round houses) and boat nousts (haul outs) are endangered.

The new assessment focused solely on the World Heritage property and found it to be “extremely vulnerable” to sea level rise, precipitation change and increased frequency and intensity of storms.

A climate impacts workshop in Scotland

UCS worked in partnership with James Cook University, Historic Environment Scotland (HES), the University of the Highlands and Islands, Orkney Islands Council and ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites) to test a new rapid assessment methodology – the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) – for the first time on a cultural World Heritage site.

Thirty stakeholders, including archaeologists, climate scientists, heritage managers, businesses and local community members gathered in Orkney for 3 days in April 2019. The workshop applied the CVI methodology and concluded that Skara Brae and the group of sites with which it makes up the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage property are in the highest category of climate risk.

The finding was announced at the 43rd World Heritage Committee meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, on July 2^nd where more than 150 nations gathered to discuss the protection of some of the planet’s most iconic and important natural and cultural sites.

Coastal erosion at the end of the sea wall protecting the Neolithic village of Skara Brae. Photo: Adam Markham.

The development of the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI)

UCS first identified the need for a systematic review of climate risk to all World Heritage properties in a 2016 report published with UNESCO and UNEP. Then in 2017, at a meeting that UCS participated in on the German Baltic island of Vilm where experts gathered to discuss priorities for the revision of the World Heritage Committee’s decade-old climate policy, the idea for a vulnerability index for sites at risk from climate change was introduced.

Two researchers at Australia’s James Cook University, oceanographer Scott Heron and Jon Day – a former director of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park – had taken up the challenge to design a rapid assessment methodology that could be used for all types of World Heritage sites.

Following more development, the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) was first tested at the natural World Heritage site, Shark Bay in Western Australia in 2018.

Soon after, UCS joined the CVI development team, and ICOMOS (one of the three official Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Committee) included it as a project of its new Climate Change and Heritage Working Group.

The foundation of the CVI is to look at how key climate change impacts the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of World Heritage properties (a property’s OUV describes the characteristics for which it was inscribed on the World Heritage List). If OUV is significantly degraded or lost, a property can be put on the World Heritage in Danger list, or even de-listed completely.

In addition to assessing climate risk to the OUV, a very important aspect of the CVI is that it also looks at the economic, social and cultural vulnerability of the community associated with the World Heritage site.

 The CVI’s potential for World Heritage Management

The detailed and comprehensive report from the Orkney CVI workshop, which was unveiled at the meeting in Azerbaijan, will serve as a model for other CVI reports in the future. The CVI process will continue to be honed and strengthened in a pilot phase that will continue at least through 2020, with site workshops already being planned for the cultural landscape of the Vega Archipelago in Norway, and the natural tri-national Wadden Sea property (Netherlands/Germany/Denmark).

HES will be integrating the CVI findings into the revision of the management plan for the Heart of Neolithic Orkney (a process that began in 2019), and the agency has proposed that CVI workshops also be undertaken for two additional Scottish World Heritage sites in 2020 – the Antonine Wall, and the island of St. Kilda.

The pilot CVI workshops in Shark Bay and Orkney have demonstrated that for the first time, we have a climate risk assessment methodology customized for World Heritage than can be effectively applied across very different types of sites. The CVI is scientifically robust, transparent, repeatable and flexible enough to work everywhere from an underwater archaeology site to a tropical forest park – critical attributes if it is to be adopted within the World Heritage community.

Schematic outline of the CVI process, leading to assessments of OUV and Community vulnerabilities

It has the potential to be a hugely valuable tool for World Heritage managers and the governments that are parties to the Convention, to help them accurately understand and plan for the climate risk they are facing at each property. If applied to all World Heritage sites the CVI could help prioritize action on climate resilience and spur greater urgency amongst the States Parties in meeting their commitments under the Paris Agreement.

As an unprecedented early summer heatwave grips parts of Europe, and the worst wildfires in 20 years rage out of control in Spain, the annual meeting of the World Heritage Committee is beginning in Baku, in oil-rich Azerbaijan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The meeting comes in the wake of the recent wake-up call issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with its Special Report on 1.5°C.

The IPCC described how much worse a 2°C world is likely to be than if global temperature changes were limited to 1.5°C. For example, a further decline of 70-90 percent in coral reef is expected even at 1.5°C, but with a warming of 2°C, a shocking 99 percent of coral is expected to be lost.

There are 29 World Heritage reefs, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Belize Barrier Reef, and in the US, the Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument in the Hawaiian archipelago. According to a 2017 UNESCO analysis, coral in 21 out of the 29 properties (79 percent) experienced severe or repeated heat stress during the previous three years.

Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a US World Heritage site, provides sanctuary for Galapagos sharks, coral reefs and an extraordinary array of marine biodiversity and Pacific cultural heritage. Photo: Courtney Couch/HIMB

Worsening wildfires and a global glacier meltdown

On land, the heat and fires gripping Europe this week are another sign of a shift in climate conditions and a “new normal’ that will bring larger and more intense wildfires to many fire-prone parts of the Globe soon.

For example, devastating wildfires in Australia’s Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area came on the back of dramatic heat and drought in 2016, severely damaging unique fire-sensitive alpine and rainforests ecosystems.  Fires hit again in 2019, endangering areas of slow-growing forests including King Billy pines, some of which are 1,000 years old.

As in Tasmania, one of the biggest threats to the Cape Floral region of South Africa with its extraordinarily rich plant endemism is the increased frequency and intensity of fires. In the US, western fire seasons have gotten at least 7 weeks longer since the 1970s, and we are seeing more large fires.

World Heritage glaciers too are under threat. According to a new study from IUCN, glaciers will completely disappear from many World Heritage sites within 80 years if current rates of greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. Of the 19,000 glaciers surveyed in 46 World Heritage properties, (9% of the total of the total of approximately 200,000 glaciers world-wide), almost two-thirds could be lost.

To be inscribed on the World Heritage List, a protected area must demonstrate Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) under at least one of ten criteria. World Heritage sites that are listed wholly for the value of their glaciers include the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch and the transnational site that includes Glacier Bay and Wrangell/St. Elias National in the US, and Canada’s Kluane National Park.

Ancient sites of the Mediterranean at risk

Yet more bad news comes from a 2018 study published in Nature Communications which looked at the risk from sea level rise and coastal erosion for 49 cultural World Heritage properties situated on low-lying coasts of the Mediterranean. The analysis showed that 96% of the sites would be at risk by the end of the century, and most of them are already vulnerable.

Among the sites already at the highest risk today are the Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna (Italy), the Kasbah of Algiers (Algeria), Tyre (Lebanon) and Délos (Greece). On the island of Délos – the mythical birthplace of the Greek god Apollo and a center of Greco-Roman culture, sea level rise is pushing salt water up through the porous limestone substrate and damaging stonework and marble in this remarkable archaeological World Heritage property.

Flooding and coastal erosion aren’t the only climate threat to the Mediterranean. As elsewhere, wildfires, driven by heat and drought are increasing in the region, putting at risk World Heritage sites including the Old Town of Corfu and the monasteries of Mount Athos (Greece) and the Donana National Park in Spain.

Researcher Stéphanie Maillot shows the effects of salt water intrusion on 2,200 year old artefacts at the Délos World Heritage site in Greece. Photo: Andrew Potts.

Time for the World Heritage Committee to take action

Despite the clear and present danger that climate change represents for World Heritage sites across the globe, the World Heritage Committee has not responded to the scale or urgency of the problem. For example, if a site comes under local or regional threat from, say, mining, a hydroelectric project or uncontrolled urban development, it can be added to the List of World Heritage in Danger, with the sanction of being taken off the list if the problems are not urgently addressed.

However, no similar mechanism exists for climate change. Nor is there even any formal requirement under the World Heritage Committee’s current Operating Guidelines to assess climate risk or propose resilience or adaptation measures to address these risks when nominating a new site to the World Heritage list.

Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) will be at the Baku meetings this week, working with partners including the International Committee on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), World Heritage Watch, Historic Environment Scotland and Australia’s James Cook University to propose new strategies and mechanisms by which the World Heritage Committee could effectively address climate change. The proposals include the adoption of a Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) for World Heritage properties.

Throughout the government shutdown in January, former oil lobbyist Bernhardt stayed on the job as Acting Secretary, working hard to push forward plans for oil drilling, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and ensuring that the administration’s goal of “energy dominance” through opening new areas to fossil fuel extraction remained on track.

During the shutdown, 800 employees of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) were authorized to stay at work to process oil and gas drilling leases. Meanwhile 85% of the rest of the staff at the Department of the Interior (DOI) were furloughed, cutting off Native American healthcare programs, shuttering vital climate science research, and leaving national parks like Joshua Tree and Virginia’s civil war battlefields unprotected against vandalism and looting.

Drilling threatens lands near New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon UNESCO site

What’s happening under Bernhardt’s watch in the remote Greater Chaco Area of northwestern New Mexico illustrates in microcosm why he is perhaps the worst possible choice for the job as top steward of our public lands.

Chaco Canyon and thousands of Indigenous peoples’ sacred places and archaeological sites in the surrounding Greater Chaco Region are at risk from an unprecedented drive to frack and drill for oil and gas. The recent announcement (and then hurried withdrawal) of oil and gas lease sales within the 10-mile informal buffer zone for Chaco Culture National Historical Park shows Bernhardt’s intent, and that the land nearest to the park is not safe from oil and gas drilling.

Existing drilling wells close to Chaco Canyon, and the proposed 10 mile protection zone (in blue). Map courtesy of WildEarth Guardians.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park is centered on Chaco Canyon, which from around 850 C.E. to 1250 C.E. was the center of one of the most remarkable pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas. Chaco Canyon was among the first national monuments created by Theodore Roosevelt under the Antiquities Act in 1907. And in 1987, together with Aztec Ruins National Monument and five smaller “outlier” archaeological sites in the region, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The Chaco culture evolved and spread in the region and its people left thousands of pueblos, shrines, burial sites, cliff-stairs, track-ways, and ancient roads. Eventually there were more than 200 outlier communities, many connected to Chaco Canyon by roads. All modern pueblo peoples trace their ancestry to Chaco Canyon, and tribes including the Navajo and Hopi claim cultural affiliation with the ancient Puebloans and Chacoans. Most of the Chaco region today is traditionally Navajo land.

An extraordinary archaeological landscape at risk

It’s a rough drive into Chaco Canyon. On the northern access road, the last 13 miles are on a pot-holed and dusty washboard road that can become impassable when it rains. The first thing you see on your left as you turn off NM 550 towards the park is a big fracking well, but as you get closer to Chaco, the landscape is flat and expansive, the desert scrub vegetation is sparse, and grazing cattle and horses are few and far between. The nearest town to Chaco Canyon is 60 miles away and there is no visitor accommodation, merely a campground frequented by coyotes and rattlesnakes under a mesa. It’s an International Dark Sky Park and you’d be crazy not to stumble out of your tent at night into the cool, high-desert air and marvel at the jewel-box-bright stars of the Milky Way spilling though the black-velvet night sky.

Ancient Chacoans were closely connected to seasonal and astronomical cycles, and as you stand on mesa gazing at the night sky, you can’t help but be captivated by thoughts of how these ancient peoples connected with the same awesome spectacle. Today light pollution, associated with methane flaring from drilling sites that are creeping closer toward the park, is a real threat to the extraordinary dark sky views.

Chaco’s a harsh environment: Bone-chillingly cold in winter, dry and sometimes searingly hot in the summer, and with an average of not much more than 9 inches of precipitation annually. But in these forbidding surroundings a remarkable and enduring culture formed and grew. Before Chaco, ancient pueblo people created hunting camps or small villages that lasted a few years, or at most a decade or two. But in Chaco Canyon a culture developed that put down roots and created extraordinary architecture and a complex trade network.

Part of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon. Photo: Adam Markham.

There are a dozen monumental, multi-story sandstone “great houses” in Chaco Canyon, and the remains of some are in remarkably good condition. Great houses contained store-rooms, granaries, offices, accommodations, circular ceremonial rooms called Kivas, and some probably had military barracks and aviaries for keeping or breeding rare birds. The most famous is Pueblo Bonito, which probably had at least 650 rooms. The great houses seem to have been occupied by an elite class, while the vast majority of ancient Puebloans lived in much simpler buildings.

Archaeological evidence shows that the Chacoans participated in extensive trade networks involving copper, ceramics, turquoise, obsidian and chocolate throughout the Southwest and into Mesoamerica. From around 900AD, they were trading turquoise for scarlet macaws that originated in southern Mexico.

A cultural landscape under assault from oil and gas drilling

The Greater Chaco Region is now under unprecedented assault by the oil and gas industry, with the enthusiastic support of the Trump administration and Acting Interior Secretary Bernhardt. According to WildEarth Guardians, there are already more than 20,000 oil and gas wells in the region, and the drilling is quickly encroaching closer and closer to Chaco Canyon. In early February 2019, BLM announced plans to sell more leases in late March (March 28) for oil and gas extraction, quite a number of which were within a 10-mile radius of the park. Then, a few days later, BLM announced that it was withdrawing the lease sales for sites within 10 miles of Chaco Canyon.

This is a welcome development, but it is unlikely to be the last time that BLM tries to push drilling closer to the park. Archaeologist Paul Reed of the non-profit cultural resources advocacy group Archaeology Southwest says,“I think this is probably a temporary victory, and the parcels will come up again in a future lease sale…I encourage folks to contact BLM to protest the March 28 lease sale, even with the near Chaco parcels removed.” And according to the Society for American Archaeology, land parcels that are still up for lease outside the informal 10-mile buffer zone, but are within the Greater Chaco cultural landscape, also contain important Chachoan remains. The US non-profit advisory body for World Heritage, US/ICOMOS (US Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites) has also protested the expansion of lease sales in the Chaco landscape.

Energy development on a Chaco Canyon access road. Photo: Adam Markham

Tribes and archaeologists want a drilling moratorium

Representatives of tribes, archaeologists, environmental advocates, and heritage experts are angry because planning for the new lease sales appears to have continued unimpeded during the recent government shutdown even though the Farmington Resource Management Plan and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) have not been completed.

Oil and gas leasing in the area continues despite calls by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the Navajo Nation, and the All Pueblo Council of Governors (APCG) for a moratorium on drilling in the whole Greater Chaco Region, pending initiation and completion by BLM and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of an ethnographic study of cultural landscapes in the region. The study has not been initiated and new well openings continue apace. According to the NCAI, more than 400 new fracking wells have been approved in the region since 2013, and approximately 90% of federal lands in the oil- and gas-rich San Juan Basin, of which Chaco Canyon is the geographical center, have already been leased for drilling.

For the protected ruins inside the park and associated protected areas, the primary impact of the expanded oil-shale drilling is from air, noise, and light pollution. But outside the park boundaries, the concrete drilling pads, massive rigs, pump jacks, and dense network of oil industry roads are damaging a huge sacred and cultural landscape left by the Chacoans, and about which we know very little. The burden of increased water and air pollution falls largely on Navajo communities who have little say in the leasing or management of BLM lands.

Oil and gas land grab should disqualify Bernhardt

In May 2018, Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich introduced legislation to ban drilling and fracking on federal lands within 10 miles of the boundaries of the Chaco Culture park. The Chaco Cultural Area Protection Act is also supported by the APCG and the Navajo Nation. New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland, the newly elected Chair of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests & Public Lands, and a tribal citizen of Laguna Pueblo, dubbed the latest drilling leases proposed (and then quickly withdrawn) by BLM a “land grab”, lamenting the lack of consultation with tribes.

David Bernhardt’s DOI is waving aside and ignoring the protests of tribes, Indigenous organizations, environmental groups, archaeologists, and New Mexico’s congressional representatives. Bernhardt, with his history of lobbying for drilling and mining interests, and his tangled thicket of conflicts of interest, seems not even slightly committed to the stewardship of public lands for the benefit of future generations, but only to the short-term benefits of the oil and gas industries. For this reason alone, he is not qualified to be confirmed as Secretary of the Interior.

Half of Australia’s great barrier reef bleached in recent back-to-back extreme heat episodes. Climate change of more than 1.5°C will be lethal for coral reefs worldwide. Credit: NASA.

There’s no way to sugar coat this. We’ve ignored all the warnings. We’ve ploughed on with the use of fossil fuels in the face of overwhelming evidence that this was not just a bad choice, but the worst one. And now we’ve brought ourselves to the brink of ecological catastrophe. Half a degree of additional global warming, on top the 1°C we’ve already caused doesn’t sound like much but the truth is that it could be absolutely devastating for many ecosystems and global biodiversity. For the world’s coral reefs at least, failing to limit warming to 1.5°C will be fatal, and even at that level of warming, the new IPCC report concludes that “the majority of warmer water coral reefs that exist today (70-90%) will largely disappear”. Many other biomes, ecosystems and species will also not survive, and the natural world as we know it will be irreversibly changed.

Despite the Paris Agreement’s target of keeping temperature rise below 2°C, and ideally as low as 1.5°C, all indications are that the world is barreling towards at least 3°C by 2100, and potentially significantly more, unless rapid and aggressive global actions are taken to reduce carbon emissions.

Last chance for coral reefs

More than 500 million people rely on coral reefs for food, fisheries and storm protection. The reefs, home to at least a million species of fish, invertebrates and birds, also support a globally important tourist economy and critically important cultural context for many communities and indeed whole societies. Recent massive die-backs of corals in Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, resulting from back-to-back coral bleaching events driven by extreme water temperatures led scientists to the conclusion that they had underestimated climate impacts on coral reefs in previous assessments. At 2°C say the IPCC authors, the evidence suggests that tropical shallow-water “coral dominated ecosystems will be non-existent”.

For many of us, protecting coral reefs and the millions of people who rely on them would be reason enough to take the hard actions that the latest IPCC’s emissions pathways analysis shows us will be necessary to rapidly and radically rein-in carbon emissions, but this new IPCC report gives us myriad other reasons to act. Aside from the catastrophic impacts predicted for coastal communities, agriculture and human health, the broad-scale implications for natural ecosystems and global biodiversity are shown to be huge.

Many ecosystems are at greater climate risk than we realized

The impacts for many ecosystems are much worse than many scientists expected when they embarked on the Special Report. For example, in addition to coral reefs, recent die-offs in mangroves (already highly threatened by deforestation and coastal development) have led scientists to realize that they had underestimated the climate threat for this vital ecosystem too. Coastal seagrass beds and kelp forests, already impacted by climate change, will be even more severely threatened by warming above 1.5°C. According to the IPCC, sea urchins which were able to reach Tasmania from mainland Australia as a result of climate-driven changes in ocean currents have already devastated kelp populations there, and the risk to kelp worldwide is growing rapidly.

Kelp forests are keystone species for marine ecosystems but their future will be in question in many places if we exceed 1.5°Celsius of global warming. Credit: Chad King/NOAA

Also of major concern are Arctic & Antarctic marine ecosystems. In the Arctic, where ecosystems are already being transformed by warming that has been higher than elsewhere on the planet, the likelihood of experiencing ice-free summers is ten times higher at 2°C than at 1.5°C. The combination of warming and ocean acidification (which changes the carbonate chemistry of the water and particularly affects species that use calcium carbonate for their shells and/or skeletons) is already impacting bivalve mollusks (such as oysters, clams and mussels), pteropods (pelagic mollusks also know as “sea butterflies) and Antarctic krill, a crucial element of polar food webs, and vitally important for whales, as well as for fish and seabirds. According to the IPCC, at temperatures above 1.5°C, the risk to bivalve mollusks shifts to high or “very high.”

Species such as this Costa Rican rufous motmot in will be at risk if 20% or more of Central America’s tropical rainforest is lost as result of climate change. Credit: Ian D. Keating.

What a difference half a degree makes!

Globally, the damage to ecosystems would be markedly more severe at 2°C in contrast to 1.5°C. Almost twice as much of the globe’s land area is projected to experience changes in biomes (major habitat types: e.g. tundra, tropical forest or desert) at 2°C (13%) than at 1.5°C (7%). For example, tropical rainforest in Central America would be reduced by 20% at 1.5°C, 30% at 2°C, and loss would rise to a staggering 50% at 3°C – most likely being replaced by savanna and grassland. New and novel biomes will likely form as the species assemblages in current biomes breakup due to climate change, and species shift at different rates, or become extinct in response to climate change. The IPCC highlights regional high risk of warming above 1.5°C to “tropical and desert ecosystems in Asia, Australian rainforests, the fynbos and succulent karoo areas of South Africa, and wetlands in Ethiopia, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe”. Largely because of drying and increased wildfire impact, South Africa’s unique fynbos biome, awarded World Heritage status for its extraordinary floral diversity and related endemic birds and insects, is predicted to lose more than twice as much area at 2°C (45%) than at 1.5°C (20%). At 3°C scientists say 80% of the fynbos would be gone.

Also since the 2014 IPCC report, the danger to insect populations has become better understood, and the new report concludes that nearly three times as many insect species may lose more than half their current habitat at 2°C (25%) than at 1.5°C (9%).  The implications for ecosystem functionality could be huge, given insects’ key role in ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and pollination.

Tipping points revealed

Some alarming ecological tipping points are also identified in the Special Report. For example, one highlighted study shows that the biodiversity and productivity functions of the prairie pothole ecosystem of the U.S. and Canada would be preserved at 1.5°C, but not at 2°C. The prairie pothole region of the Great Plains is home to 50% of North America’s waterfowl and its wetlands provide key ecosystem services including groundwater recharge, filtering of pollutants and erosion control. There is a threshold in the Mediterranean region, where only limiting warming to 1.5°C can prevent ecosystem changes “unprecedented in the last 10,000 years”. For boreal forests (the forests that survive in the harsh, cold and nutrient poor conditions of the far north), a tipping point is thought to lie between 3°C and 4°C, a threshold that will be reached much earlier at higher latitudes than further south (NB. Regional impacts of a global average warming of 1.5°C or 2°C will vary and some regions will warm more than others). Dieback of boreal forests would also likely trigger positive feedbacks as warming and drying drive larger and more intense fires, thereby increasing carbon emissions. Boreal forest will eventually undergo a landscape-scale conversion into open woodlands or grassland.

The new IPCC assessment has revealed just how big the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C for ecosystems and biodiversity truly is. For me, the message of the science is that we have consistently underestimated the magnitude and speed of ecological impacts in the past, and that new and alarming feedbacks, tipping points and thresholds continue to be revealed as we learn more. Our understanding of the complexity of these changes is growing fast, but we already know (and have known for at least 20 years) more than enough to justify taking the political action that is needed to transform our energy systems away from fossil fuels. Keeping warming to 1.5°C is the tallest of tall orders, but it is the minimum we should aim for if time is not to run out for many of the earth’s natural systems as we know them today. As my UCS colleague, climate scientist Peter Frumhoff notes “If we care about Earth’s future on a time scale of our grandchildren’s grandchildren, we should be looking into ways to keep global temperature rise even lower than the lower bound of the Paris temperature targets.”

Climate threats were not anticipated when the Convention was signed in 1972

Added to the World Heritage list in 2018, Pimachiowin Aki in Canada, part of the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg people. Photo: Bastian Bertzky/IUCN

Adopted at the General Council of UNESCO in 1972, the World Heritage Convention’s core mission is to protect and conserve the World’s most important natural and cultural heritage. Back in 1972, there was no hint that climate change would become the systemic threat to World Heritage sites that it has since proved. To be inscribed on the World Heritage List, a protected area must demonstrate Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) under at least one of ten criteria. For example, in the US, the Statue of Liberty is listed under two criteria, as a “masterpiece of the human spirit” and as a “symbol of ideals such as liberty, peace, human rights…”. Yellowstone National Park is listed under four criteria, including for its scenic splendor, unparalleled geothermal activity, intact large landscape and role as a refuge for wildlife.

If a site should come under threat from, for example, mining, deforestation or urban development, it can be added to the List of World Heritage in Danger, with the possibility of being de-listed if the problems are not addressed. This year, Kenya’s Lake Turkana was added to the Danger List, because of an immediate threat from upstream development of the Gibe III Dam in Ethiopia.

Climate change is a major threat to the OUV to many World Heritage properties, but the Danger List does not seem an appropriate tool for addressing the issue, as no one state party can address the threat on its own. Neither does the nomination process for new World Heritage sites require any assessment of whether the OUV may be degraded as a result of climate change. It seems absurd that site nomination dossiers which are extremely detailed, take years to complete and require the inclusion of comprehensive management strategies, have no obligation to include even the most basic assessment of climate vulnerability. Consequently, UCS is working with partners to try and identify ways to better respond to climate risks within the World Heritage system.

Climate change is the fastest growing threat to World Heritage

At a workshop in Bahrain last week, we asked a group of natural and cultural World Heritage site managers from around the globe whether they were experiencing climate impacts at the site where they work, 21 of 22 said yes, and 16 of the 22 described actions they are taking to monitor or respond to climate change  And that makes sense, because we know from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and a host of country and site-level studies that the impacts of climate change are everywhere. But it also drives home the point that this issue is not getting as much attention as it needs at the higher levels of the Convention. Climate impacts are clearly being under-reported by states parties under the official mechanisms of the Convention – the State of Conservation (SOC) reports, and IUCN’s World Heritage Outlook 2 report, published in 2017, identified climate change as the biggest potential threat to natural world heritage and estimated that one in four sites is already being impacted. This also must be an underestimate. In fact, virtually all properties must be being impacted in some way, the key question is how severe the threat to OUV is for each site, and over what time-scale?

UCS, with UNESCO and the United National Environment Program (UNEP) has published 31 representative case studies of World Heritage properties being impacted by climate change, including Yellowstone National Park and the Galapagos Islands. In Bahrain, we heard many new stories about how climate change is affecting World Heritage properties, including for example the immediate risk of flooding and erosion to the Islands of Gorée and Saint-Louis in Senegal, vulnerability to changes in rainfall patterns at Petra in Jordan, and the potential loss of cave paintings & petroglyphs in Tasmania. The historic city of George Town in Penang, Malaysia suffered unprecedented damage from a typhoon in 2017, the kind of extreme storm that the area has not normally had to face in the past.

Map showing highest level of heat stress for the 29 World Heritage reefs during the third global coral bleaching event, Image: NOAA Coral Reef Watch/UNESCO

Although there was a 2014 independent analysis of long-term sea level vulnerability to cultural World Heritage sites that identified 136 out of 700 , the only group of World Heritage properties for which a comprehensive scientific assessment of climate risk has been undertaken, are the coral reefs. There are 29 World Heritage reefs, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Belize Barrier Reef, and Papahānaumokuākea in the Hawaiian archipelago. According to UNESCO’s 2017 analysis (Scott Heron and Mark Eakin, both of NOAA, were coordinating lead authors, along with Fanny Douvere from the World Heritage Centre), coral in 21 out of the 29 properties (79%) have experienced severe or repeated heat stress during the past three years. Projecting impacts into the future, under the IPCC’s RCP 8.5 scenario, with a global average temperature of 4.3C by 2100, twice-per-decade severe bleaching would be apparent at 25 of the World Heritage Reefs by 2040.

Why we need a Climate Vulnerability Index for World Heritage

What is needed is a simple, standardized methodology for top-line rapid assessment of climate vulnerability that would work for all World Heritage sites, whether listed for natural, cultural or mixed values. Such a tool would enable the World Heritage Committee to determine which World Heritage properties are most immediately at risk from climate change, where the problems will likely be in the future, and where resources are most urgently needed for more detailed assessment and monitoring, and to undertake resilience and adaptation activities. The methodology needs to be repeatable so that periodic reviews can be undertaken.

Island of Saint-Louis, Sénégal – a World Heritage site at immediate threat from sea level rise. Photo: Dominique Roger/UNESCO

To meet this need, a Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) for World Heritage properties has been proposed. If adopted by the World Heritage Committee, it has the potential to influence responses to climate change at the World’s most important natural & cultural heritage sites. The concept emerged at an expert meeting on the Baltic island of Vilm, Germany, in 2017, which UCS participated in, and was proposed in the meeting outcome document.  The meeting which was called in response to a decision at the World Heritage Committee in Krakow earlier in 2017 to prioritize climate action and resilience, to investigate the implications for the OUV of World Heritage sites, and revise the Convention’s decade-old climate policy.

At the Bahrain meeting of the World Heritage Committee, the CVI concept was presented at a side event organized by two of the Committee’s three official advisory bodies (IUCN and ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites)) in which UCS participated, and at a meeting of the ICOMOS Climate Change & Heritage Working Group co-organized by UCS at the National Museum of Bahrain. The CVI idea is gaining traction. Its value to the Committee would be that it could help quickly identify thematic groups of properties – such as Arctic sites, coastal archaeology, or high mountain ecosystems – at risk, then provide for a deeper dive into all sites within a threatened category, flagging individual sites in need of urgent action or further assessment at the national level.  Critical for the success of the CVI is that it can be applied to both natural and cultural sites, so that a methodology that works for coral reefs, can also work for earthen architecture or cave paintings.

Outside of the side events and the workshops of the advisory bodies and NGOs, where it was a bigger topic than ever before, climate change was hardly mentioned in the plenary sessions of the World Heritage Committee. Only Committee members Trinidad & Tobago and Australia substantively raised the issue, the latter offering an amendment to the Bahrain decision document which was adopted without objection, and which requires the revised climate policy to be presented at the 43rd Committee meeting in Azerbaijan in 2019. Now there is a window of opportunity for civil society to influence the policy revision, and for the vulnerability index concept to move forward. It’s an opportunity that, if taken, could influence how the World Heritage Convention deals with climate change for decades to come.

Working in Greenland, Jørgen Holleson (lead author of the new study and an archaeologist at the National Museum of Denmark) has demonstrated at Qajaa in West Greenland that warming soil temperatures and changes in soil moisture are accelerating microbial decay of organic archaeological materials. Also according to Holleson, at some Thule Culture grave sites in southern Greenland, where organic remains including mummies, kayaks and hunting implements were present as late as the 1970s, recent field work has revealed that little or no organic material still remains.

Coastal erosion is washing away our heritage

Perhaps the most urgent issue in Arctic archaeology is that of coastal erosion. Permafrost thaw, changes in the freeze/thaw cycle and wave action during storms are combining to accelerate erosion processes. The loss of seasonal sea ice which protects the coastline from winter storms in some parts of the Arctic is also a major factor.

On Alaska’s North Slope, co-author Anne Jensen is engaged in a major rescue effort at Walakpa to study and document the archaeology of land occupied by semi-sedentary Alaskan Natives for at least 4,000 years which is eroding alarmingly rapidly, taking with it structures, artifacts and graves. Severe erosion is also wiping out archaeological sites on the East Siberian Sea coast and in North Western Canada where the most important sites of the aboriginal inhabitants, the Inuvialuit are endangered. “We’re losing the history of large areas of Canada” study co-author, Max Friesen of the University of Toronto told the Globe and Mail. The site of Nuvugaq on the Mackenzie River delta, for example, where 17 large houses and a communal structure used by an Inuit bowhead hunting group group known as the Nuvugarmiut, which was first reported from the Franklin Expedition in 1826, has already been completely washed away due to thawing permafrost and storms.

A 2016 photo of the remains of a large Inuvialuit house on the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula on Canada’s Beaufort Sea coast, which has since been completely washed away. Photo: Max Friesen

Loss of sea ice, tundra fires and uncontrolled development

Also directly threatening archaeological sites in the Arctic are worsening tundra fires and the spread of shrubby vegetation as temperatures warm. Additionally, loss of sea ice in the Arctic is opening the region to more shipping traffic, military activity and industrial and urban development. It is also enabling increased tourism, including on larger cruise ships. The potential for uncontrolled tourism development causing damage to archaeology in a warming Arctic is very real. Tour companies will likely seek new landing areas for small boats carrying more visitors into fragile areas in the high Arctic, and in parts of the region there is expected to be increased pressure from tourists walking on sites, camping and using motorized vehicles.

Treasure hunting and looting of archaeological sites is also becoming a more serious problem with warming. Co-author Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences has documented “mining” of mammoth ivory at important “kill sites” in Siberia, where poachers use high pressure pumps to extract ivory from the thawing ground to sell on the black market. The increased numbers of tourists in the Arctic means that more people are able to casually pick up and keep (often illegally) artifacts they find eroded from coastal sites or melting ice patches and glaciers. And increased storm damage and erosion means that more artifacts are emerging.

A rapid assessment is needed to prioritize actions

In the face of unprecedented changes to the Arctic environment, the study authors argue that there is an urgent need to rapidly assess the vulnerability of key Arctic archaeological sites and develop strategies for prioritizing the use of scarce resources most effectively. With every storm, important archaeological remains are being washed into the ocean, whilst throughout the region organic materials are being rapidly lost to decay in warming soils after being preserved for centuries. Undoubtedly the assessment that there are 180,000 archaeological sites in the Arctic is an underestimate, and many important sites are likely to be lost or damaged before they have even been recorded. The impact of climate change on Arctic archaeology represents a catastrophe for world heritage, and one that requires urgent mitigation and adaptation action to respond to the scale of the crisis.

The report, Sea level Rise and Storm Surge Projections for the National Park Service, was published late on Friday May 18^th, with no official announcement or accompanying press release – indeed, no easy way to find it unless you know where to look (hint: it’s here…tell your friends). The report has been several years in the making, and was delayed for several weeks after a draft showing edits removing mentions of human-driven climate change emerged and was reported in The Reveal. In the wake of these revelations, Department of Interior (DOI) Secretary Ryan Zinke was questioned about the changes by House Democrats Chellie Pingree (Maine) and Betty McCollum (Minnesota) in a House Appropriations subcommittee soon after the controversy broke in April. Responding to a question about the report by Pingree, Zinke responded: “If it’s a scientific report, I’m not going to change a comma.”

Since then, the references to human-caused climate change and climate attribution that had been proposed for deletion, have been restored. What we now have in the public domain at last, is a hugely important and detailed analysis of how projected future sea levels and storm surges may impact 118 US national parks. The findings are quite dramatic.

Dozens of US parks at risk from flooding and inundation

The report identifies dozens of famous and iconic sites including Virginia’s Historic Jamestowne and Assateague Island, Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas, the Florida Everglades and Jean Lafitte National Historic Park in New Orleans, as especially vulnerable. Several of the sites at risk were also identified by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in its 2014 report “Landmarks at Risk”, which built on previous NPS climate impacts research. Nationally, the new analysis shows that the highest average rate of sea level change by 2100 is projected for the National Capital Region, which puts sites on the Potomac River, and in and around the National Mall at risk.

Simulation of flooding from a category three hurricane striking Theodore Roosevelt Island, Washington DC. Credit: NPS

The highest total sea level rise by the end of the century is expected to be seen on coastline of the Outer Banks, threatening Wright Brothers National Memorial, Fort Raleigh and Cape Hatteras, and the broader Southeast Region is expected see the highest storm surges in the future. National parks on Caribbean and Pacific islands are at risk too, including in Puerto Rico and the US territories of Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands.

Parks must plan for worse storms & floods

Using Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sea level rise scenarios and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data, the report also looks at how increased rates of sea level rise will interact with increasing hurricane intensity to worsen storm surges. When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012, storm surge caused widespread flooding throughout the region. That larger storm surge rode in on seas about 12 inches higher than in the pre-industrial period due primarily to warming oceans and melting land ice. Further analysis found that sea level rise added $2 billion to the damages from Hurricane Sandy in New York City. According to the NPS, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused in excess of $370 million in damage to national parks. The costs of 2017’s hurricanes Harvey, Irma & Maria to America’s parks have not yet been fully tallied, but will be large.

The authors of the new report recommend that because of the likely intensification of hurricanes, park managers should base planning on impacts likely from storms at least one storm category higher than any storm that has previously hit their particular park unit. According to the report “When this change in storm intensity (and therefore, storm surge) is combined with sea level rise, we expect to see increased coastal flooding, the permanent loss of land across much of the United States coastline, and in some locations, a much shorter return interval of flooding”. A suite of detailed storm surge maps for 54 sites has been posted on the NPS Coastal Adaptation page on Flickr.

Flood projection for a category 3 hurricane at high tide, Boston Harbor Islands, Massachusetts. Credit: NPS

A win for science and scientific integrity. This time.

The new NPS sea level rise analysis and storm surge maps represent a huge leap forward in terms of the tools that park managers, especially in some of the more remote locations, have available to them to assess the vulnerability of sites, and prioritize planning for resilience. It builds on a growing body of policy- and management-relevant climate science that the NPS’s Climate Change Response Program has been developing over the last decade. This work continues to keep the US at the cutting edge of international efforts to understand and manage climate impacts on cultural and natural heritage, and protected areas. It’s a pity that the DOI seems to be doing everything it can to make this report invisible, and that some of the climate scientists involved had to fight so hard to maintain the scientific integrity of their work.

After the study was published, report author Maria Caffrey, told journalist Elizabeth Shogren, the fight will have been  “worth it if we can uphold the truth and ensure that scientific integrity of other scientists won’t be challenged so easily in the future…”.  For the sake of our treasured national parks, and the dedicated staff who look after them, let’s all say Amen to that.

Founded in 1945, when nations were seeking ways to rebuild educational systems and cultural connections in the immediate aftermath of World War II, UNESCO today is a leading multi-lateral organization working on a range of issues crucial for achieving peace, equity and sustainability world-wide.

“Every day, countless Americans and American communities pour their time and their hearts into UNESCO-led international collaborations on science, on education and on culture” says Andrew Potts who practices cultural heritage law at Nixon Peabody LLP.  They work on preventing violent extremism via youth education, on literacy and educating women and girls, on science for development, and on free speech and journalist safety. And of course, they fight for cultural diversity and heritage through UNESCO projects like the World Heritage program, biosphere reserves and the Creative Cities initiative.

UNESCO recognition benefits US communities

Mission San Antonio de Valero “The Alamo”, in San Antonio, Texas. Photo: NPS

UNESCO recognition and connections can bring economic benefits to US communities. For example, according to a State Department news bulletin from August 2017, Tucson, Arizona, which was listed as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2015, has experienced an increase in tourism and restaurant revenues as a direct result, as well as millions of dollars of earned media coverage.

The US withdrawal announcement on October 12^th came smack in the middle of Iowa City’s eight-day UNESCO City of Literature Book Festival. It also came right on the heels of San Antonio, Texas’ second World Heritage Festival, a new annual event that already attracts thousands of visitors to celebrate and learn about the San Antonio missions – including the Alamo – that were added to the UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2015.

Although US World Heritage sites won’t lose their status when the US leaves UNESCO, there will likely be little or no federal support for collaboration and engagement with the international agency or its staff.

Relationship status: It’s complicated

The US has a complicated history with UNESCO. It helped to found the organization and has always been actively engaged, but it has also withdrawn once before.

At the height of the cold war in 1984, Ronald Reagan pulled the US out. At that time, a report on the implications for US science published by the National Research Council identified disruptions to international scientific collaborations, reduced confidence in US scientific leadership and forfeiture of the right to participate in governance of UNESCO-led scientific initiatives.

The US ultimately continued to provide an equivalent level of international financial support for science, culture and education, but the impacts of withdrawal were significant in the scientific community.

George W. Bush took the US back into UNESCO nearly 20 years later in 2002, and then in 2011, the Obama administration drastically cut back on financial support to UNESCO in response to Palestine being granted full membership.

The process for withdrawal takes some time, and the US will not formally cease to be a member of UNESCO until December 31^st, 2018. The State Department has said the US remains committed to UNESCO’s important work and will seek observer status.

Secretary Tillerson could put action behind that talk by committing to put the equivalent of the US’s former UNESCO dues payments into other international collaborations in science, education and culture.

“Wars begin in the minds of men”

The opening words of UNESCO’s constitution carved in 10 languages in Toleration Square, Paris. Photo: UNESCO.

Meanwhile, it is the words of the American poet Archibald MacLeish that are enshrined in UNESCO’s constitution and etched in 10 languages on the Tolerance Square wall at the organization’s headquarters in Paris: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

According to outgoing UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, “[that] vision has never been more relevant” than it is today. In a moving and very personal statement in response to the news of the US withdrawal, Bokova said,

At the time when the fight against violent extremism calls for renewed investment in education, in dialogue among cultures to prevent hatred, it is deeply regrettable that the United States should withdraw from the United Nations agency leading these issues.

Under Bokova’s leadership, with major involvement from the US, UNESCO has been at the forefront of efforts to protect heritage sites and museum collections in Iraq and Syria as ISIS forces have tried to destroy monuments and stamp out culture.

She has also spearheaded implementation of the United Nations Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity, in a world where journalists’ freedom to work and safety is constantly under threat.

Through its Science for Sustainable Development program which many US universities participate in, UNESCO has launched important initiatives to increase the number of women in science, to ensure science is at the heart of policy-making for sustainable development, to fully value Traditional Ecological Knowledge and to champion open access to scientific information.

Protecting World Heritage

UCS led the team that produced UNESCO’s 2016 report on climate change and World Heritage. Photo: UNESCO.

It is probably for its work on World Heritage that UNESCO is best known to most Americans. The World Heritage Convention was set up to help protect for future generations, natural and cultural heritage deemed to be of universal value for humankind.

There are 23 World Heritage sites in the US, amongst them, the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Yellowstone, Yosemite and Mesa Verde national parks. Many of America’s World Heritage sites and cultural sites are at risk from climate change impacts including worsening wildfires, more intense storms, sea level rise and coastal flooding.

The National Park Service, which is a global leader in researching and responding to the effects of climate change on protected areas, has historically been a major player in the World Heritage Convention under UNESCO’s leadership.

Indeed, just as the US is planning to withdraw from UNESCO, the international World Heritage Committee is preparing a major effort to step up its engagement with the implementation of the Paris Agreement (a global commitment to act to reduce global warming emissions to address climate change), and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and to update its policy on climate change for the first time in a decade.

UCS will be fully engaged in that process, building on the policy recommendations in our report on climate and world heritage, published with UNESCO and UNEP in 2016.

The Trump administration, however, is relegating federal scientists, experts and agencies to bystander status with one more pointlessly anti-science jab at the international community. In response Potts says,

Now more than ever, as with the Paris Agreement, it will be incumbent on US cities, universities and NGOs to pick up the reins of global education, science and cultural collaboration; to continue to make American contributions to all these critical endeavors and to make sure American communities benefit from their progress.

In all, 21 new sites were added to the World Heritage list, and although most are not immediately vulnerable to climate change, probably all are already experiencing local climatic shifts, and most will be significantly impacted within a few decades unless action is taken soon to reduce heat-trapping emissions globally. Climate change is a fast-growing problem for World Heritage and one that the World Heritage Committee needs to take much more seriously than it currently is.

Climate is the biggest global threat to World Heritage

In 2014, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) identified climate change as the biggest potential threat to natural World Heritage sites and a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the University of Innsbruck in Austria found 136 of 700 cultural World Heritage sites to be at long-term risk from sea level rise. In 2016, a joint UCS, UNESCO, UNEP report concluded that “climate change is fast becoming one of the most significant risks for World Heritage worldwide”. This year, UNESCO launched two new reports highlighting the dramatic climate threat to coral reefs in World Heritage sites, and to sites in the Arctic.

The World Heritage Committee needs to address climate change

There is a dilemma here. The World Heritage Convention is a remarkable international instrument that was set up to identify and protect both natural and cultural sites of “outstanding universal value” for future generations. However, when the convention was adopted in 1972, the threat of global climate change was nowhere on political or scientific radar screens, and so the mechanisms of the treaty were geared to preventing local impacts such as water pollution, mining & quarrying, infrastructure development and land use change.

The convention hasn’t yet effectively responded to modern climate change risks. If a World Heritage site is threatened by coal mining, tourism pressure or suburbanization, it can be placed on the list of sites in danger, and then the responsibility lies with the host country to implement management actions reducing the threat. But no site has yet been placed on that list because of climate change.

Meanwhile, places at serious risk from climate change are still being added as new World Heritage sites. UCS plans to work with UNESCO’s two primary international non-profit technical advisors, IUCN and ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) to address this issue at next year’s World Heritage Committee meeting.

Four newly designated World Heritage sites vulnerable

Here are the four newly designated sites already being impacted by climate change:

Lake District, United Kingdom

The Lake District. Photo: Adam Markham

A spectacular landscape of glaciated valleys and lakes, this region was the cradle of the English Romantic movement led by the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and home to the authors Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin. Its agro-pastoral landscape dotted with hill farms and stone walls is the result of hundreds of years of sheep farming, and the Lake District is now one of Britain’s most popular tourism destinations.

Unfortunately, the area is already experiencing warmer, wetter, winters and more intense extreme weather events. Disastrous floods in 2009 washed away old bridges and footpaths, and unprecedented drought in 2010-12 affected water supply and water quality in lakes and rivers. Conservation managers predict that species at the edge of their ranges in the Lake District, including cold-water fish such as the Arctic char, could become locally extinct, peat habitats may dry out, woodland species composition will change and invasive alien species like Japanese knotweed will proliferate in response to changing conditions.

Kujataa, Greenland (Denmark)

Ruined Norse buildings at Kujataa. Photo: UNESCO/Garðar Guðmunds-son

Kujataa in southern Greenland holds archaeological evidence of the earliest introduction of farming to the Arctic by Norse settlers from Iceland, and earlier hunter-gatherers.

Today, it’s an exceptionally well preserved cultural landscape of fields and pastures from medieval times through to the 18^th Century, representing a combination of Norse and Inuit subsistence farming and sea mammal hunting. However, in common with the rest of Greenland, the area is experiencing a rapidly warming climate.

Coastal erosion exacerbated by sea level rise and more intense storms can damage historic monuments and archaeology. Elsewhere in Greenland, warming temperatures have been shown to hasten decomposition of organic material at archaeological sites, including wood, fabrics and animal skins – a growing problem throughout the Arctic. Warming at Kujataa is also expected to increase the growth of shrubby vegetation and alter agricultural cycles, potentially necessitating changes in cropping strategies by local farmers.

Landscapes of Dauria, Mongolia & Russian Federation

Daurien steppe wetlands. Photo: UNESCO/O.Kirilyu

This new transboundary World Heritage site covers a huge area of undisturbed steppe, and is a globally important ecoregion. Home to nomadic Mongolian herders who have used the grasslands for over 3,000 years, the Daurian steppes are also rich in biodiversity. They are important for millions of migratory birds and home to almost all the world’s Mongolian gazelle population as well as threatened species such as the red-crowned crane and swan goose.

According to a climate impacts assessment by IUCN, the mean annual temperature of the region has already risen by 2°C and further climate change is expected to bring longer and more severe droughts, reducing grassland productivity and changing wetlands dramatically in what is already a landscape of cyclical weather extremes. Desertification and wildfires worsened by climate change are adding further environmental pressures.

‡Khomani Cultural Landscape, Republic of South Africa

‡Khomani San cultural heritage has at last been recognized. Photo: UNESCO/Francois Odendaal Productions

The ‡Khomani San (or Kalahari bushmen) are the indigenous first people of the Kalahari Desert, but they were forced from their land when the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (now part of the  Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park) was created in 1931. The displacement led to dispersion of the ‡Khomani San people through South Africa, Namibia and Botswana and almost killed off many traditional cultural practices as well as ancient languages such as N|u.

After apartheid ended, the San were successful in settling a land claim and the new World Heritage site, which coincides with the boundaries of the national park, recognizes their thousands of years of traditional use of this land, their close connection to its natural systems and their right to co-manage the preserve.

Unfortunately, climate change presents a new challenge. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected accelerated warming and a drying trend for this area of southern Africa, and in recent decades conversion of grassland into savanna, with more un-vegetated soil has been reported and increased desertification is a growing threat. Kalahari Gemsbok National Park is the fastest warming park in South Africa and scientists have recorded a rise in mean maximum annual temperature there of nearly 2°C since 1960.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the president of the United States the power to designate lands and waters for permanent protection. Almost every president since Teddy Roosevelt has used the Act to place extraordinary archaeological, historic and natural sites under protection and out of reach of commercial exploitation.

Many sites originally designated as national monuments were later upgraded by Congress to become national parks, including Bryce Canyon, Saguaro and Death Valley. In many cases in the past, the Antiquities Act allowed presidents to protect vital natural and cultural resources when congressional leaders, often compromised by their ties to special interests representing coal, oil, timber and mining industries, were reluctant or unwilling to act.

A new Executive Order signed by President Trump on April 26^th, 2017 puts this important regulatory tool for conservation and historic preservation at risk. The clear intention of the Executive Order is to lay the groundwork for shrinking national monuments or rescinding their designation entirely, in order to open currently protected public lands for untrammeled growth in coal, oil and minerals extraction.

A clear intention to open public lands for coal and oil exploitation

The Executive Order requires the Secretary of the Interior to review all presidential designations since 1996 of national monuments over 100,000 acres in size. However, in the short-term it appears particularly aimed at reversing designations or reducing the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, which together comprise 3.23 million acres in Utah.

An attack on the Antiquities Act is an attack on all monuments and has huge implications for future presidents’ ability to protect important sites in the future.

President Trump announces the review of national monument designations, while Secretary Zinke and the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt look on. Photo: Department of the Interior

Remarkably, in its own press statement, the Department of the Interior (the federal agency responsible for managing and protecting our public lands) tips its hand and signals that it has no intention of undertaking a fair and independent review by describing Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears as the “bookends of modern Antiquities Act overreach”.

Secretary Zinke himself was quoted ridiculing “people in D.C. who have never been to an area, never grazed the land, fished the river, driven the trails, or looked locals in the eye, who are making the decisions and they have zero accountability to the impacted communities.”

But, in fact, national monument designations almost always derive from a local grassroots demand for greater protections, and usually only come after lengthy periods of community engagement and consultations.

A vital conservation tool in a changing environment

The Antiquities Act itself grew from years of pressure from archaeologists and those who were concerned about looting and damage to Ancestral Pueblo and other tribal sites in the Southwest. Over the years, its use has expanded to include natural sites on land and large marine ecosystems.

Presidents G. W. Bush and Barack Obama, for example, both designated important ocean areas as national monuments to safeguard marine productivity, fish spawning areas and fragile ecology. When President Obama announced the designation of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, he drew particular attention to the threat posed to this almost pristine area by climate change.

Conditions have changed since 1906. US population has more than tripled since then, urban and suburban growth has increased markedly and many of the archaeological and cultural sites that were once under threat mainly from looting and natural resource exploitation are now also vulnerable to climate change. UCS documented the climate threat in its 2014 report Landmarks at Risk and its 2016 report on climate threats to World Heritage sites, published with UNESCO and UNEP.

In his speech designating Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, President Obama cited the threat of climate change. Photo: James Watt/DOI/SeaPics

Tribal cultural resources under attack again

Ironically the attacks on tribal heritage that were behind the signing of the Antiquities Act in 1906 have come full circle with this new assault by the Trump administration more than a century later.

Five sovereign Tribes, all with ancestral ties to Bears Ears, including the Hopi and the Navajo Nation have formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to protect the monument. Bears Ears contains thousands of sacred and culturally important sites and many Native Americans continue to perform ceremonies and gather medicinal plants there. Bears Ears also contains thousands of archaeological sites, including, for example, the Lime Ridge Clovis site, providing evidence of occupation going back 11,000-13,000 years or longer.

Tourists who visit Bears Ears and other national park units in the Southwest, including World Heritage sites such as Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, are drawn not just to the incredible landscapes, but also to the extraordinary cliff houses, pit houses, pictographs and other Ancestral Pueblo remains.

Monuments provide local economic benefits

Tourism is an important economic driver around national parks and monuments. The National Park Service generated $34.9 billion in 2016 and supported 318,000 jobs. Bears Ears alone attracts more than 900,000 visitors annually, providing a very significant boost to the local communities.

A 2014 study of 17 national monuments by Headwaters Economics found that the local economies all expanded following the monument designation. Secretary Zinke seems to think that local communities are unhappy with national monuments, but a 2016 Colorado College poll showed that fully 80% of westerners oppose removing existing monument designations.

No president has ever tried to revoke a predecessor’s monument designation before, and if that is the direction this Administration is going in, we owe it to future generations to fight this action. The national monuments and parks of the United States tell the story of who we are and where we came from. They represent the diverse stories of Americans and help define us as a nation. An attack on national monuments is an attack on us all, and the histories we share.

Refugees are fleeing conflict and violence in war-torn countries—including Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo—but climate-related events are also causing a rising number of displacements worldwide. In some parts of the world, extreme weather events such as drought are increasing the risk of conflicts and worsening conditions for refugees and displaced people.

One person every second is displaced by climate

According to United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) one person every second is being displaced by climate factors, with an average of more than 26 million people displaced by climate and weather-related events annually since 2008. More than 65 million people worldwide are currently displaced and 21 million of them are classified as refugees. Developing countries host the vast majority of refugees, and the number who are permanently resettled in the developed world is only about 100,000 annually, or less than 1 percent.

More than 20 million Bangladeshis may be displaced by climate impacts by 2050. Photo: Connor Ashley/Asia Foundation

The US has been the international leader for refugee resettlement for at least the last 40 years. Since 1975, the US has admitted more than 3 million refugees for resettlement, including 85,000 in 2016. But is that about to change? In his campaign for the presidency, Donald J. Trump threatened to send Syrian refugees back to a war zone where more than 11 million people have been driven from their homes since 2011. Within a few days of becoming president, Trump tried to ban all Syrian refugees, along with those from six other predominantly Muslim countries.

Outdated legal definitions don’t take climate change into account

The number of people displaced by sea level rise, coastal inundation, drought, and other extreme weather events is projected to rise sharply in the next few decades. And yet people who are forced to leave their homes because of climate-related impacts cannot currently be legally classified as refugees.

Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, only those who have had to flee their country because of conflict or persecution qualify as refugees. According to international law, people fleeing famine, drought, or natural disasters do not qualify as refugees, even if they are forced to cross international borders. However, in the light of worsening climate impacts, some climate mobility advocates are testing the traditional definition of refugees, and recent court cases have been brought in New Zealand and Australia by and on behalf of Pacific islanders who are being forced to abandon their homes and communities as a result of rising seas.

Climate change will vastly swell numbers of displaced persons

At the recent Global Security Conference in Munich, Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, the UN’s top climate official said, “Climate change is a threat multiplier that leads to social upheaval and possibly even armed conflict.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned of an increase in climate migrants and refugees driven by extreme event, and concluded that “Populations that lack the resources for planned migration experience higher exposure to extreme weather events, particularly in developing countries with low income. Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks.”

The Government of Bangladesh has estimated that more than 20 million Bangladeshis may be displaced by mid-century. The 22 Pacific Island nations estimate that 1.7 million of their 9.2 million inhabitants (nearly 20 percent of the total population) will face displacement by 2050. The International Organization on Migration (IOM) has estimated that by 2050 the number of people displaced by climate change could be as high as 250 million worldwide.

Unfortunately, the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change fell short on practical measures to respond to climate displacement and made no recommendation about changing the international definition of refugees to include climate refugees. The agreement merely notes the importance of respecting the rights of migrants, and setting up a “Climate Displacement Task Force” to propose measures “to avert, minimize and address displacement related to the adverse effects of climate change.”

Climate change makes the droughts that help drive famine and conflict more likely

Globally, climate change is driving more intense storms and floods, coastal inundation and erosion, and worsening wildfires and droughts.

The impacts of extreme weather events on people can be dramatic. In 2015, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) for example, 3 million people in Myanmar and the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh were displaced by flooding. And Cyclone Pam caused 55 and 25 per cent respectively of the populations of Vanuatu and Tuvalu to seek safety away from their homes.

Last November, ActionAid published a report on the drought effects of the 2015-16 El Niño during which approximately 30 percent of the world’s landmass was affected by drought and more than 400 million people were negatively affected. This extraordinarily severe and complex drought has caused countless people to be displaced globally, including more than 200,000 in Ethiopia alone. The drought has forced people in Djibouti, Somalia, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, the Philippines, India, and many other countries to move away from their homes and communities, or to seek help across the borders of other countries.

Natural El Niño cycles have always caused weather disruptions, but there is a growing body of scientific evidence to suggest that El Niños are likely to be intensified by climate change. The 2015-16 El Niño was stronger than the prior record-breaking El Niño of 1997-98, which, in its turn, was worse than previously recorded El Niños. New science is helping to show the extent to which individual events are becoming more intense or more likely. Other studies predict that mega-droughts are likely to become more frequent in some regions of the world.

Whilst the causes of the current conflict in Syria are complex and multi-faceted, there is some science indicating that it may have at least some of its roots in climate change. The severe drought in northeast Syria from 2007 to 2010 was the worst in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failures and mass migration from rural to urban areas, factors which contributed to the economic disruptions and social unrest that were factors in the 2011 outbreak of civil war which has caused at least 11 million Syrians to flee their homes, with nearly 5 million those becoming refugees. One study estimated that that a regional drought of this magnitude was made two to three times more likely to occur by human-induced climate change.

Climate impacts are driving people from their homes in the US as in Pacific nations

The droughts that drive people from their homes develop over a period of months, years, or even decades and are called “slow onset events” by the humanitarian aid community (in contrast to floods and storms which are “rapid onset events” and cause immediate displacement). Sea level rise and coastal inundation are the slow onset events most associated with climate change in the public mind, and many communities across the globe are already moving, or preparing to move.

Approximately 1700 Carteret islanders from Papua New Guinea will have to be relocated to the mainland. Most of their food gardens have already been damaged by rising sea levels. Photo: Friends of the Earth

Many villages impacted by sea level rise have already had to relocate or plan relocations in the Pacific nations of Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea, and Samoa. In the US, the residents of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, mostly members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, are being forced from their land by sea level rise, and the Quinault Indian Nation village of Taholah on Washington’s coast is planning to relocate as is the Alaskan Native village of Kivalina on the Chukchi Sea. Thirty more native Alaskan villages have been identified as in imminent danger from climate impacts.

The US should be a leader on climate displacement and mobility

With internal climate displacement already manifest inside the US, and the seeds of a climate refugee crisis growing in vulnerable countries worldwide, now is the time for the US to reaffirm, not retreat from its commitment to refugees, and to provide international policy leadership on climate displacement.

An immigrant nation, the US has long been a beacon for the rest of the world, welcoming millions seeking a better, safer life. More than a million Irish immigrants sought to escape from famine between 1845 and 1855, refugees and political exiles fled to America after the European political upheavals of 1848 and the Mexican and Russian Revolutions of 1910 and 1917.

America’s values are embodied by the Statue of Liberty, which is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site for being “a masterpiece of the human spirit” and “a highly potent symbol—inspiring contemplation, debate, and protest—of ideals such as liberty, peace, human rights, abolition of slavery, democracy, and opportunity.” At the statue’s centennial celebration in 1986, President Reagan said “Miss Liberty is still giving life to the dream of a new world where old antagonisms could be cast aside and people of every nation could live together as one.

Despite the US priding itself on being an immigrant nation, refugee policies have often been controversial here, and undercurrents of racism, bigotry, and xenophobia have frequently surfaced. President Harry Truman fought hard to get Congress to pass the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, and when he did finally get the bill to sign, he was incensed at its limitations, particularly what he saw as discrimination against Jewish and Catholic refugees in the Allied occupation zone of Germany. He said “The bad points of the bill are numerous. Together they form a pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice.” Nevertheless, more than 650,000 displaced Europeans were allowed to enter the US between the end of the Second World War and the early 1950s.

Ronald Reagan welcomed more refugees to the United States than any other president since Harry Truman. “It’s good to know that Miss Liberty is still giving life to the dream of a new world” Reagan said in 1986.

Is President Trump abandoning US moral leadership on refugees?

Every president since Truman has supported programs to bring refugees to the United States. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said of the Refugee Relief Act of 1952, “In enacting this legislation, we are giving a new chance in life to 214,000 fellow humans. This action demonstrates again America’s traditional concern for the homeless, the persecuted and the less fortunate of other lands.”

More refugees were resettled under President Reagan than under any other president, especially from Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Iran, and he reiterated traditional American values. In 1985 in an address to the UN, Reagan reaffirmed “America is committed to the world, because so much of the world is inside America. After all, only a few miles from this very room is our Statue of Liberty, past which life began anew for millions… The blood of each nation courses through the American vein.”

President Trump’s vision couldn’t be further from the post-war presidential tradition of acceptance of refugees as a moral duty or the acknowledgement that immigrants provide the lifeblood of America’s strength, vibrancy and diversity. The Trump administration is divisively stoking fears of foreigners, increasing deportations, clamping down on refugees, deliberately scaring undocumented immigrants ,and seeking ways to discourage legal immigration, especially from majority Muslim countries.

Meanwhile, the international refugee crisis is worsening. There have never been more people displaced by conflict, political violence, and natural disasters than there are today. Climate change is already exacerbating the problem and will become a direct driver of unprecedented forced mobility in the next few decades.

When climate displacement reaches a critical point, which side of history will America come down on? Will it be the closed borders of President Trump’s America First isolationism, or will we respond in the manner of President Truman to “human suffering that the people of the United States cannot and will not ignore”?

History will judge us on how we respond to the coming climate displacements, just as it will judge us if we fail to do all we can to support today’s refugees from conflict in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and so many other places.

Avalanche Lake, Glacier National Park, near Whitefish, Montana where Ryan Zinke was raised. Photo: NPS

Do you accept that there is unequivocal scientific evidence for human caused climate change?

Congressman Zinke has said “The climate is changing, I don’t think you can deny that. But climate has always changed” continuing that “I don’t think there’s any question that man has had an influence” but that “what that influence is, exactly, is still under scrutiny.” And in October 2014, Zinke said “It’s not a hoax, but it’s not proven science either…”. In fact, there is overwhelming scientific consensus and unequivocal evidence that the global climate is warming, and that since the 1950’s the dominant cause has been human influence. 

Will you support and effectively utilize nationally important climate science programs throughout DOI?

Increasing temperatures, coastal flooding and erosion, more extreme weather events, worsening wildfires and droughts, melting glaciers and thawing permafrost all represent massive risks for natural and cultural resources under the protection of the Department of the Interior (DOI) in the 500 million acres of public lands it manages. DOI’s strategic plan states that it “will bring the best science to bear to understand these consequences and will undertake mitigation, adaptation, and enhancements to support natural resilience…”

The department’s climate science stable is strong, with a formidable Climate Change Response Program in the National Park Service, and a network of eight regional Climate Science Centers (CSCs) managed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that synthesize climate impacts data to make it usable and relevant for resource managers. DOI also runs a network of 22 Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) which bring federal and state agencies together with non-governmental organizations, tribal entities, and academic institutions to manage natural and cultural landscapes across jurisdictional boundaries, with a strong emphasis on integrating climate management.

Are you committed to do everything you can to protect our national parks in the face of climate change?

Climate change is the biggest threat to our national parks. Impacts can already be seen throughout the country, from colonial Jamestown Island to Glacier National Park, just a few miles from where Congressman Zinke was raised, in Whitefish, Montana. The National Park Service is at the cutting edge of international efforts to develop climate adaptation and resilience strategies for protected areas, but it desperately needs more resources to implement effective management strategies. The NPS has a system wide Climate Change Response Strategy and is implementing an ambitious Climate Change Action Plan. Most recently, in January 2017, the NPS published a groundbreaking Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy (CRCCS) which lays out key policies needed to protect America’s heritage in a rapidly warming world, including advocating the incorporation of climate science into all planning for cultural resources management.

Will you fight for the budget and resources our national parks need?

Americans love their national parks, and in 2016 a record 325 million people visited them. The national park system is the envy of the world, but it is being starved of resources – not just for climate response, but for all aspects of its operations. The latest report from the National Park Service detailed a backlog of nearly $12 billion in deferred maintenance. The parks support $30 billion in economic activity and nearly 300,000 jobs. The budget for the NPS has been cut by 12% ($364 million in the last five years) 

Climate change is driving worsening wildfires in the West. Are you committed to helping to coordinate and implement an effective federal response?

Rising temperatures have created a longer wildfire season and drier conditions that together with forest management strategies, fire suppression policies and increased development at the wildland-urban Interface are causing bigger, more damaging and costly fires. The US Forest Service and DOI are together the coordinating federal agencies for wildfire response and management. UCS has noted the urgent need to update federal wildfire policies and budgeting in line with what we know about the growing influence of climate change. Legislation has been proposed to invest in hazardous fuels management, fire-fighting technology and improved fire-mapping. However, a budget fix is also needed. In a June 2016 U.S. Senate hearing, Robert Bonnie, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and the Environment, USDA, testified that: “The single most important step Congress can take to advance forest health and resilience is to enact a comprehensive fire budget solution—one that addresses both the growth of fire programs as a percent of the agency’s budget and the compounding annual problem of transferring funds from non-fire programs to cover the cost of fire suppression.”. To date, Ryan Zinke’s record shows that his preferred response to the worsening wildfire situation is merely to increase logging and timber extraction, ostensibly to reduce fire risk.

Are you committed to keeping America’s public lands public for the benefit of all Americans?

Congressman Zinke has said giving away public lands is “a non-starter … in Montana, our public lands are part of our heritage.” He even resigned as a member of the Republican Party Platform committee last year in protest at moves to make public land transfers part of the platform. But in January 2016, after being nominated for the position of Interior Sectretary, Zinke voted for a House rules package that included a measure to make transfers of public land cost-free and budget neutral, considerably easing the path for future privatization which would no longer require costs of transfers to be offset with other spending or budget cuts. Zinke says he hasn’t changed his view on public lands transfers to state, local or private hands, but can he be trusted to hold the line?

Natural gas production pad at Padre Island National Seashore, Texas. Photo: NPS

Will you fully implement the DOI policy on scientific integrity?

DOI has one of the strongest scientific integrity policies of all government departments. It safeguards against political interference in department science and grants its scientists freedom to communicate their science. The policy aims to ensure that Interior Department decision-making can rely on robust and trustworthy science of the highest quality. It encourages “an environment of rigorous and honest investigation, open discussion, and constructive peer review, free of political influence that is needed for good science to thrive.” DOI scientists and scholars are also encouraged to participate in professional societies and scientific meetings, as well as talk to the media about their work. But the policy is only as good as its implementation. It is crucial that Representative Zinke prioritize scientific integrity at his agency.

Have you changed your mind about supporting air and water safeguards on mining, oil and gas operations?

In 2015 the League of Conservation Voters scored Ryan Zinke at a miserable 3% for his environmental record. He has voted to weaken the Clean Water Rule proposed by the EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers and to remove safeguards on air and water protections, including from chemicals in fracking and stream pollution from mountain-top mining.

Can we trust you to limit fossil fuel infrastructure that will negatively impact our public lands, environment and cultural resources?

A train taking Montana coal towards the West Coast. Photo: Tim Evanston/Creative Commons

“I always side with Montana Coal Country,” Congressman Zinke said in a campaign ad in 2016, and he has been a major champion of the Gateway Pacific Terminal in Washington which would be the transport hub for increased coal experts from the western states, to Pacific Rim countries. The terminal was denied a permit by the US Army Corps of Engineers on the basis that the Lummi tribe’s treat-protected fishing rights would be affected and has been opposed by communities through which coal trains would pass.

Zinke also served on the board of an oil pipeline technology company from 2012 to 2015 and has been an outspoken supporter of the Keystone pipeline since being elected to Congress. Zinke is likely to be at the center of any renewed fight to on routing the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL). In December 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to grant an easement for DAPL to pass through land sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and vital for cultural important water resources. The Corps will now prepare an Environmental Impacts Statement for alternative routes, and Zinke as Interior Secretary will likely play a central role in the future of the pipeline.

The Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy (CRCCS) was just published on January 6; Rockman was the lead author. It addresses climate change across the National Park System and is aimed at helping park managers and scientists plan and implement responses, and not least, communicate the scale of the problem to the public.

Climate is now the greatest threat to national parks

NPS Director Jon Jarvis, who retired this week, called climate change “fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced.” During his tenure he positioned the park service as a leader and innovator among US agencies in responding to the climate challenge.

The NPS has established climate monitoring and impact assessment programs and in 2009 established a multi-disciplinary Climate Change Response Program. In 2010, the NPS published its first Climate Change Response Strategy, laying out the four pillars of a comprehensive approach: science, adaptation, mitigation, and communication.

San Francisco’s Embarcadero district, which includes the Beaux Arts style Ferry Building, is at risk from sea level rise and flooding. Photo: JaGa

The publication of the CRCCS builds on the goals of the 2010 strategy and provides practical follow-up to a 2014 policy memorandum in which Jarvis noted that “Climate change poses an especially acute problem for managing cultural resources because they are unique and irreplaceable — once lost, they are lost forever.

The NPS is the lead cultural resource agency for the federal government. In addition to the National Park system it holds responsibility for programs including the National Register of Historic Places (including more than 1.4 million buildings, sites, monuments, and structures), National Scenic and Historic Trails, National Heritage Areas, and the American Battlefield Protection Program. It also administers the Federal Historic Preservation Tax Incentives Program.

Cultural resources covered in the new strategy include archaeological sites, buildings and structures, museum collections, ethnographic resources (heritage traditionally important to diverse cultural groups), museum collections and cultural landscapes. The NPS recognizes not only the threat to cultural resources from climate, but also that these resources can provide vital information and data regarding human responses to climatic and environmental changes in the past, and in this way potentially contribute to adaptation and resilience strategies for the future.

We can learn from the past, to become more resilient in the future

Archaeological evidence from Wupatki National Monument in northern Arizona shows that the local Sinagua people responded to a volcanic eruption and subsequent decades long shift to a drier climate by moving to the plains below the crater where they began to farm using volcanic cinder mulch to maintain soil moisture and increase crop productivity.

At San Juan National Historic site in Puerto Rico, modern technology has been combined with 18^th-century water engineering to restore seven underground cisterns in Castillo San Felipe del Morro and Castillo San Cristóbal to support sustainable water use.

And in Mount Rainier, in response to increased flooding driven by climate change, engineers have turned away from the modern use of riprap (boulder embankments) which was proving ineffective and begun using engineered log-jams and log structure techniques reminiscent of those used in the early 20^th century to repair roads and control erosion.

The new CRCCS notes with some understatement that “it is difficult to learn from cultural resources, develop adaptation strategies for them, or incorporate them into mitigation plans if they have been damaged or destroyed.” And they are being damaged and destroyed—from Fort Jefferson in Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park to the eroding 4,000-year-old Inupiat Eskimo sites at Cape Krusenstern National Monument in Alaska.

The CRCCS identifies 21 categories of direct and indirect climate change interactions that are already or will in the future affect cultural resources, including:

• Increased temperature
• Changed freeze/thaw cycles
• Permafrost thawing
• Higher relative humidity
• Increased wildfires
• Changes in seasonality and phenology
• Species shift
• Changes in precipitation patterns and extreme weather events
• Increased flooding, inundation and coastal erosion
• Higher water tables
• Salt water intrusion

Examples of impacts identified by the NPS include sea level rise and damage to the wooden foundation of the Cockspur Lighthouse at Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia, erosion of Native American shell mound sites at Canaveral National Seashore in Florida, and risk of increasing wildfire damage to archaeological resources in Yosemite and Mesa Verde National Parks. Changing rainfall patterns and more intense downpours have already severely damaged the more than 200-year-old adobe Franciscan church in Tumacácori National Historic Park in southern Arizona.

Stephanie Meeks, president and CEO at the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP, a close UCS partner in launching the Climate Heritage Coalition) applauded the launch of the report saying,  “At a time when more and more of our nation’s irreplaceable historic resources are experiencing the impacts of climate change…This report provides timely and essential guidance to both NPS managers and historic preservation partners to anticipate, plan for, and respond to the effects of a changing climate on our shared cultural heritage.”

The CRCCS includes a focus on species that are culturally significant to diverse communities. Pine nuts harvested from Piñon pines have been traditionally important for Native American tribes in the Southwest for centuries. Photo: NPS

Cultural heritage in every national park is at risk

The consequences of climate change for cultural resources identified in the new report are quite staggering in their diversity and comprehensiveness. So much so that it is hard to escape the conclusion the NPS makes that “it is likely that cultural resources in all park units are or will be affected by climate change in some way.”

Whilst the impacts of sea level rise, coastal erosion, storm surge, and increasing wildfires have been well documented in reports such as UCS’s National Landmarks at Risk, the CCRS highlights many lesser-known impacts too. A small sampling of those described in the report includes:

• Damage to foundations and stone-work because of increased frost heaving, waterlogging, thawing permafrost, or drought
• Cracking, spalling, warping, and cracking of masonry and other building materials
• Historic building drainage systems unable to cope with increased extreme rainfall events
• Collapse of caves and bedrock alcoves
• Flaking and abrasion of petroglyphs and pictoglyphs
• Accelerated deterioration of organic material such as paper, wood, paintings, fabric, and animal skins
• Increased mold, especially in enclosed sites such as vaults, tumuli, and caves
• Loss or shifting range of culturally important species (e.g. walrus, salmon, piñon pine)
• Reduction or loss of medicinal and ceremonial plants used during particular times of the year
• Altered appearance of important ceremonial sites
• Changes in view-sheds
• Spread of destructive plats and insects such as termites and kudzu to threaten structures
• Submerged sites exposed due to lower water levels
• Increased risk of looting from exposure (as with eroding coastal sites, lowering lake levels and melting ice patches)
• Inundation and submersion of traditional homelands and consequent loss of social connections and interactions
• Disassociation of historic districts and settings due to pressure to relocate or elevate structures
• Increased erosion of limestone and mortar structures, and lime or shell cliffs resulting from ocean acidification
• Increased risk of damage to shipwrecks due to loss of protective concretions and or coral reefs (resulting from ocean acidification and warming)

Given the huge array of potential impacts and the sheer number of resources under the care of the NPS, the CRCCS lays out some guidelines for addressing the scale of the problem. For example, it notes that there is now a clear need to integrate global and local climate change data and projections into all cultural resource management and planning. This is being done, for example, at Tumacácori. Having seen the unexpected damage to the church from extreme rainfall, NPS cultural resource managers, material scientists and climate researchers are now working closely together to understand fine-scale local climate patterns and their implications for the historic structures in the park.

In addition to site-specific guidance, the CRCCS provides some important broad-scale policy recommendations, including:

• Take urgent steps to target survey and documentation programs to evaluate resources, assess their vulnerabilities, and prioritize options to respond before they are lost
• Develop guidance to relate historic preservation legislation and programs to climate change adaptation
• Integrate cultural resources into Disaster Preparedness and Response (noting that climate change will unfold as a long string of disasters of varying rates and intensities, and that good planning can assist in disaster recovery when such events and impacts occur)
• Incorporate cultural resources in sustainability and climate change mitigation efforts by maximizing the energy efficiency of historic buildings through continued maintenance and continuing to add energy efficiency and renewable energy methods to historic buildings and landscapes (referencing the work of the NTHP Preservation Green Lab)
• Consider contemporary significance of potential historic resources through consultation with diverse stakeholders.

We must prioritize because not everything can be saved

As noted above, the CRCCS explicitly recognizes that it will not be possible to save or protect all the cultural resources under the mandate of the NPS, and that a process of vulnerability assessment and prioritization will have to be undertaken, both nationally and at the individual site level.

Buildings on Officers’ Row at Fort Hancock undergo stabilization after Hurricane Sandy in November 2012. The fort is in the Sandy Hook unit of Gateway National Recreation Area, New York Harbor. Photo: NPS/Wickersty

Scenario planning has been adopted by the NPS to develop climate responses and strategies that are robust in the face of varying levels of uncertainty regarding the rate and scale of specific climate impacts and their interactions with each other, and with other environmental stressors.

Prioritization involves assessing climate vulnerability across resources in a park, assessing the level of importance or significance of each resource at risk, reviewing adaptation options, and then making implementation decisions.

Such a process had already begun at Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City and New Jersey when Hurricane Sandy struck. Gateway includes Fort Hancock, along with gun batteries, airfields, missile silos, nine historic districts, and more than 600 historic structures, and attracts nearly 10 million visitors annually. Prior to Sandy, the park authorities had used characteristics such as resource condition, public use potential, and uniqueness to identify three categories of cultural resource, those that should be preserved, those that should be stabilized to minimize impacts, and those that could be left to deteriorate or be lost. The pre-storm categorization was later updated and combined with data assessing Sandy’s damage patterns and new flood mapping to guide reconstruction after the storm and to form the basis for the park’s new General Management Plan.

Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Shenandoah National Parks, the National Capital Region of the NPS and Cape Lookout National Seashore, among others, are now also carrying out various prioritization processes for their cultural resources.

At Cape Lookout, where two historic villages on the barrier islands are at high risk from rising sea levels, NPS staff have partnered with researchers from North Carolina State University, Western Carolina University, the US Geological Survey Southeast Climate Science Center, the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, and local community members to assess adaptation options. The range of potential options for action include no intervention, offsetting stress, relocation, and documentation in advance of permanent loss.

Climate stories can help push back against denialists in Washington D.C.

The NPS is at the forefront of climate vulnerability assessment and response internationally, as UCS documented in its recent joint report on climate change and World Heritage sites with UNESCO and UNEP.

The CRCCS identifies as a key strategy the importance of connecting with partners both in the US and globally to learn and share innovations in cultural resource management in the face of climate change. From the Oxford Rock Breakdown Laboratory in the UK (with its focus on climate impacts on historic stonework), to the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) project which is dedicated to learning from the past to assist future resilience, the NPS is increasing its coordination with international projects wherever possible.

One of several innovations the NPS is bringing to the table which has not been developed elsewhere is climate change literacy and interpretation training programs for park managers and rangers.

With more than 300 million visitors annually, our national parks offer an unprecedented opportunity to bring the best available climate science directly to the American people in ways that that they can easily understand and in places that they care deeply about.

When all is said and done, the new communications goals that the CRCCS lays out for researching and writing climate stories for each national park and incorporating them in interpretation, outreach, and educational materials, may be among its most important contributions. It may be these stories that help to push back the current wave of climate denial in Washington by bringing home to Americans who love their national parks what we stand to lose if we don’t act decisively to slow climate change.

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N.B. I would like to acknowledge advice and input for this blog from Anthony Veerkamp (Field Director, San Francisco Office) and Jeana Wiser (Senior Manager, Resilient Communities, Preservation Green Lab) of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. All opinions and any errors are my own.

Just this week, in an interview with the LA Times Zinke said “The climate is changing, I don’t think you can deny that. But climate has always changed” continuing that “I don’t think there’s any question that man has had an influence” but that “what that influence is, exactly, is still under scrutiny.” And in October 2014, Zinke said “It’s not a hoax, but it’s not proven science either…”

Who is Ryan Zinke?

Zinke is a 23-year Navy Seal veteran and fifth-generation Montanan who was elected to the House in 2014 after serving six years in the state senate. He ran for election on national security and energy independence issues and is an advocate of increased coal, oil, and gas development on public lands.

In his first term as a Congressman he has voted to:

• Weaken controls on air and water pollution in national parks
• Lift the federal ban on crude oil exports
• Undermine protections for endangered species
• De-fund efforts to clean up Chesapeake Bay
• Weaken the Antiquities Act by limiting the president’s ability to designate new national monuments

The Statue of Liberty was closed to visitors for nine months after Hurricane Sandy. Photo: NPS/earthcam

In 2015 the League of Conservation Voters gave Zinke a bottom-of-the-barrel 3% score for his environmental record. He would have scored zero but for his one positive vote against cutting off funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).

In 2016 the National Parks Action Fund, a group affiliated with the National Parks Conservation Association, gave Zinke an F for his voting record on key bills affecting national parks. He has, however, been a strong supporter of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) and co-sponsored a bill to extend funding for the Historic Preservation Fund.

Congressman Zinke favors opening more public lands to oil and gas drilling, is a strong supporter of Montana’s coal industry and has voted against regulations to protect waters in national parks from toxic surface mining run-off. He has drawn the line, however, at the prospect of privatizing public lands, saying selling them off is “a non-starter … in Montana, our public lands are part of our heritage.”

In July 2016, he resigned as a delegate to the Republican National Congress over the inclusion of the transfer of federal lands to the states in the party platform. According to a March 2016 profile by Troy Carter in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle

“Zinke sees himself as a traditional conservationist and he’s upset about the current state of forest health. Annual forest fires, he believes, are only going to get worse. The answer is for Congress to “put more scientists in the forest and less lawyers…I have a deep admiration for Teddy Roosevelt. I have a deep admiration for the original concept of the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, all of which were signed, by the way, into law by Dick Nixon.”

Why is the Department of Interior so important?

The Department of Interior’s primary responsibilities are to protect and manage the United States’s natural resources and cultural heritage, provide scientific information about those resources, and uphold the federal government’s responsibilities to recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes.

DOI manages 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, 35,000 miles of coastline and 29,000 historic structures. DOI agencies include the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

National Park Service archaeologists working at an Alaskan site. Photo: NPS

With 70,000 staff and a huge and diverse portfolio, DOI is the steward of the nation’s extraordinary natural, cultural, historic, and heritage resources, and nowhere is that more apparent to the American public than in the national parks. The National Park Service is the most popular federal agency after the Postal Service, and its more than 400 properties receive more than 300 million visits annually.

To take on the role of Secretary of the Interior is to assume responsibility for the legacies of John Muir,  Theodore Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, and all the other American visionaries that have recognized the sacred trust each generation should have for the next in protecting and managing the United States’ natural and cultural heritage.

To do this with any kind of success in the 21st century requires that any incoming secretary must support climate change science and monitoring within DOI and advocate its incorporation in management and resilience strategies for public lands, wildlife, cultural resources, and historic sites. A recent analysis concluded that sea level rise alone poses a risk to more than $40 billion worth of national park assets and resources.

National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis has called climate change “fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced” and current Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said at Glacier National Park in August this year “You cannot get out on these landscapes and deny climate change is there.] I see it everywhere I go.”

When Glacier National park was established there were 150 glaciers, now there are only 25 and all are expected to gone by or before 2030. A new climate attribution study published in Nature GeoScience concluded that global glacier retreat provides “categorical evidence” of climate change.

Congressman Zinke, whose district includes Glacier National Park also has noticed the changes, but questions the extent of human responsibility.

In May 2015 in Bozeman, Montana, he said, “I think, without question, the climate is changing…You know, if you go up to Glacier (National) Park and you have your lunch on one of the glaciers, you will see the glacier recede as you eat lunch…So you know I have seen the change in my lifetime. I think man has had an influence…the degree to what that influence is..?”

Zinke’s acknowledgement that the glaciers of Glacier are melting hasn’t yet shaken his faith in fossil fuels: “I think you need to be prudent.  It doesn’t mean I think you need to be destructive on fossil fuels, but I think you need to be prudent and you need to invest in all-the-above energy…I think natural gas probably provides the easiest path forward and the cleanest protection…”

Climate change and our national parks

Saguaro National Park is one of many vulnerable to climate change. Photo: NPS

Under the leadership of Secretary Jewell, her predecessor Secretary Salazar, and Director Jarvis, the National Park Service has become one of the most active US agencies in monitoring and communicating about climate impacts as well as putting in place management strategies to respond. Its interdisciplinary Climate Change Response Program is a ground-breaking and highly successful initiative that has gained international attention and plaudits, and which should be continued and expanded under the new administration.

In June 2014 Secretary Jewell told USA Today “I would say the science is clear. Whether or not you choose to think about the causes of climate change, all you have to do is open your eyes and look around you to see that climate change is real…So we can no longer pretend it’s going to go away. We have to adapt and deal with it.”

Secretary Jewell’s personal observations from her travels throughout the National Park system are backed up by a large and growing body of scientific literature. A recent study concluded that three-quarters of all national parks are experiencing early spring. As UCS showed in our 2014 report Landmarks At Risk, climate impacts such as intense extreme rainfall events, damaging floods, worsening droughts, thawing permafrost, and coastal erosion are affecting national parks throughout the country.

Some of the most convincing evidence of climate impacts of climate change and of the work of National Park Service scientists can be found right in Congressman Zinke’s backyard—Yellowstone National Park. Average annual temperatures have risen 0.17˚C per decade since 1948 and spring and summer temperatures are predicted to rise by 4.0-5.6˚C by the end of the century, making hot dry summers the norm and transforming the ecosystems this iconic landscape.

Across the American west, climate change is driving a trend toward larger, more damaging wildfires, and fire season has lengthened by an extraordinary 78 days since 1970.

Whitebark pines in Yellowstone National Park are threatened by warming temperatures, shorter winters and mountain pine beetle infestations. Photo: Adam Markham

Yellowstone winters are already shorter, with less snowfall and many more days when temperatures rise above freezing than there were in the 1980s. Earlier snow melt and warmer summer temperatures are dramatically changing stream flow, river temperatures, and the condition of seasonal wetlands in the park, putting populations of native cutthroat trout, chorus frogs, and trumpeter swans at risk for the future.

Damaging climate impacts to wildlife and ecosystems have been recorded in Saguaro, Rocky Mountain, Glacier Bay, Biscayne, and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks as well as Yosemite, the Everglades, and many others.

Cultural resources are no less at risk. As UCS’s 2016 joint report with UNESCO and UNEP, World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate documented, The Statue of Liberty was closed for nine months after Hurricane Sandy and $77 million has had to be spent to restore services and access on Liberty and Ellis Islands.

Extreme rainfall has damaged the Spanish mission church at Tumacácori in Arizona; sea level rise threatens black history at Fort Monroe in Virginia and the Harriett Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Maryland; colonial heritage is at immediate risk from rising water levels at Jamestown, Virginia; American Indian heritage has been damaged by floods and fires at Mesa Verde and Bandelier; and Native Alaskan archaeology thousands of years old is being lost forever as a result of coastal erosion at Cape Krusenstern and elsewhere in Alaska.

Unlike natural ecosystems which have the capacity to change or move, cultural heritage such as buildings, artifacts or archaeology can be permanently damaged or instantly destroyed by a fire, flood, or storm.

In a 2014 policy memorandum to all NPS staff, Jon Jarvis noted that “Climate change poses an especially acute problem for managing cultural resources because they are unique and irreplaceable — once lost, they are lost forever. If moved or altered, they lose aspects of their significance and meaning.” Aside from thousands of historic structures and sites, there are approximately 2 million archaeological sites within the National Park System alone, many of which are vulnerable to climate change.

Moreover, responsibility for managing the National Register of Historic Places—well over 1.5 million buildings, structures and historic sites—also lies with the National Park Service. Hundreds of sites or historic districts on the register have already been identified as severely vulnerable to climate impacts, including, for example:

• San Francisco’s Embarcadero
• Boston’s Faneuil Hall
• The historic districts of Annapolis, Maryland and Charleston, South Carolina
• NASA’s Kennedy Space Center
• Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois

The role of climate science in the Department of Interior

As incoming secretary, Congressman Zinke will inherit a department steeped in climate science and well organized and equipped to deploy it in the service of managing the nation’s natural and cultural heritage for future generations. It will be vital that he listens to the scientists and resource managers on his staff.

Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, is one of hundreds of buildings on the National Register of Historic Places at risk from climate impacts. Photo: Victor Grigas

DOI plays a vital role in delivering policy-relevant climate science, monitoring climate impacts, and adapting management strategies in the light of the latest scientific findings. The department’s 2014-2018 strategic plan states that:

“Impacts observed by Federal resource managers include drought, severe flooding, interrupted pollination of crops, changes in wildlife and prey behavior, warmer rivers and streams, and sea level rise. The DOI will bring the best science to bear to understand these consequences and will undertake mitigation, adaptation, and enhancements to support natural resilience and will take steps to reduce carbon pollution, including through the responsible development of clean energy. The DOI will be a national leader in integrating preparedness and resilience efforts into its mission areas, goals, strategies, and programs; identifying vulnerabilities and systematically addressing these vulnerabilities; and incorporating climate change strategies into management plans, policies, programs, and operations.”

DOI operates eight regional Climate Science Centers (CSCs) that synthesize climate impacts data and make it useful and relevant for resource managers and the general public. It has also established a network of 22 Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) which bring federal and state agencies together with non-governmental organizations, tribal entities, and academic institutions to manage natural and cultural landscapes across jurisdictional boundaries, with a strong emphasis on integrating climate management.

Playing roulette with Ryan Zinke?

Zinke will become the nation’s top steward of our natural and cultural heritage. It would be the height of folly to take this on without fully acknowledging the damage climate change is causing our public lands and historic sites, or the predominant role of fossil fuels in causing climate change.

And it would be nothing short of catastrophic to roll back the leadership steps that the National Park Service and other DOI agencies have taken to develop and communicate science-based management strategies to make public lands and cultural resources more resilient.

In 1936 President Franklin D. Roosevelt said:

“There is nothing so American as our national parks…. The fundamental idea behind the parks …is that the country belongs to the people, [and parks make] for the enrichment of the lives of all of us.”

Congressman Zinke has the opportunity to further this vision in the service of us all, but to do so he must acknowledge the role of climate change and most of all, listen to the hundreds of dedicated scientists on the staff of the Department of Interior.

In the past, Zinke has likened energy policy in a potentially changing climate to Russian roulette:

“If we’re playing Russian roulette…you have a one in six chance of that chamber being loaded with a bullet and you spin it, and you’ve got to put it to your head, and squeeze the trigger. So even if there’s a one in six chance…even if it’s a chance of global warming and it’s a catastrophe, then I think you need to be prudent.”

The scientists whose work he will be overseeing at DOI can tell him, however, that there’s more than just one bullet in the gun. Maybe it’s already fully loaded.

Correction (Dec. 15, 2016): The National Parks Action Fund, a group affiliated with the National Parks Conservation Association, gave Zinke an F for his voting record on key bills affecting national parks, not the National Parks Conservation Association itself as was indicated in an earlier version of this post.