STRENgthening Resilience of Cultural Heritage at risk in a changing environment through proactive transnational cooperation

STRENCH aims at improving the capacities of policy makers, public authorities, private sector and social players for STRENgthening resilience of Cultural Heritage at risk in a changing environment trough proactive transnational cooperation and coordination action aiming at exploiting output and results from targeted European Projects specifically dedicated to this topic. The main projects capitalized are the Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE projects ProteCHt2save, RUINS, HiCAPS and BhENEFIT, the H2020 projects HERACLES and SHELTER, the FP6 project "Noah's Ark" and "Climate for Culture" and the DG-EAC project "Safeguarding Cultural Heritage from Natural and Man-Made Disasters". WebGIS tools will be developed supporting the relevant stakeholders in the decision making process for safeguarding cultural heritage at risk in changing climate. The tools will include risk assessment on cultural heritage due to flash flood, windstorm and landslides as well as heavy rain, floods in large basins and fire due to drought. They will tackle the protection of additional cultural categories, such as cultural landscapes, historic parks, archaeological sites and small ruined villages in mountain and coastal areas, by capitalizing the outputs on management models for the preservation of heritage. And they will apply satellite data and services from the Copernicus programme, thus allowing to create a platform for setting up early warning systems specifically addressed to cultural heritage protection. In addition, the combination of real and near real time data from earth observation with outputs from climate models will guarantee short and long term risk assessment. The implementation of the developed sustainable risk management strategies (preparedness, emergency, recovery) will take place in selected pilot regions. This ensures the testing of the drafted sustainable risk management strategies and developed tools for targeting resilience building measures.