Abstract
Over the last decades there has been growing awareness about the need for recognition of the role that local knowledge and expressions of cultural heritage play in advising disaster risk reduction measures and practices in communities exposed to risks. A focus on the multiple forms of expression of local knowledge can contribute greatly to understanding the role that local values play in influencing responses to disaster risks, leading to the development of context-specific disaster risk reduction practices that are more likely to be
adopted and implemented by local actors. Increased recognition of the relevance of cultural heritage in building community resilience to risks has also been noted in global policy frameworks and reports such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement, as well as the IPCC. Despite the growing evidence, there are still uncertainties about the operationalization of such connections between cultural heritage and community resilience to risks.
As part of the Extended Partnership (EP) RETURN, financed under the Italian PNRR funding scheme, this project aims at contributing to bridging this gap by identifying available approaches, frameworks, and models that integrate the role played by cultural heritage into the hazard-risk-resilience discourse, for the delineation of a framework responding to the above presented needs. This research unfolds through three main steps: 1) systematic literature review, 2) analysis of results and definition of existing interactions between resilience-heritage and communities at risk, 3) development of a methodological framework to facilitate resilience assessment acknowledging the risk-resilience-heritage nexus.
The systematic literature review resulted into 264 papers, further skimmed down to 31 papers that have been extensively analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis primarily aimed at understanding the current state of the art of existing approaches towards building community resilience to risks through heritage. Secondly, we mapped the different conceptualizations of cultural heritage and resilience identified in the selected studies. This second level of analysis allowed us to further identify the different layers of knowledge, values, and functions reflected in the different types of heritage and that contribute to
boosting community multi-risk resilience.
Preliminary results have confirmed that cultural heritage is increasingly recognized as critical to improving community resilience and community capacity while developing measures and plans to reduce disaster risks. Based on resulting identified approaches, we developed an assessment model framework building the Nexus between Cultural Heritage and Hazard-Risk-Resilience, emphasising on the values held in cultural heritage and their transmission to future generations for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation purposes. The development of assessment methods includes participatory approaches to qualitatively assess the values of heritage for targeted local communities.