Use of hazard data within climate risk assessments for heritage assets - AWARD

Historic England is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. We are the Government's advisor on the historic environment. Our purpose is to improve people's lives by championing and protecting the historic environment. Through our work, collaboration, creativity and expertise we want everyone to be able to connect with and learn from our heritage.

This project will assist Historic England in planning future activity around commitments within our Corporate Plan and the Government's third National Adaptation Programme.

Historic England is working to develop a standard methodology for understanding the risks to heritage assets from climate change impacts. This methodology should seek to identify the most appropriate available resources for owners and managers of heritage assets to inform their understanding of the climate risks to their assets, limit the number of surveys required, and support them in understanding their options for managing future conditions.

So that Historic England can provide robust evidence and advice to owners and managers, we are commissioning this project to increase our understanding about which datasets are the most appropriate to use when carrying out or procuring climate risk assessments for heritage assets. It will also increase our understanding of the issues and metrics which managers and owners could make use of when assessing the vulnerability of their sites to climate change impacts.

This project aims to identify the steps owners and managers could take to a) understand the risks which high priority climate hazards may present to their sites by providing information on appropriate data sources with explanations of what the various results mean, and b) understand whether sites are likely to be vulnerable to these hazards by providing information on the metrics that managers could consider when using local knowledge at their sites to understand exposure and vulnerability.

This project will produce a standardised workflow or process which can be used by Historic England for our own work, and to provide advice for site owners and managers when carrying out or commissioning climate risk assessments. The workflow should include, but not be limited to, information on where to find the most appropriate climate hazard data sources at relevant spatial scales, the format and likely cost of these datasets, how to interpret the results (for example, what it means in practice when a dataset indicates that an area is at high risk), and how to consider vulnerability at site level.

The project will:

• oMake use of recently published Historic England research reports analysing climate change hazards relevant to heritage assets and identifying climate hazard datasets (links below), as well as expertise within the appointed consultancy, to identify datasets or tools which can most appropriately support owners and consultant...