Cultural Heritage Protection in Climate Change online

Through CHePiCC online, led by the Center for Cultural Property Protection (UWK), the strategic Erasmus+ project partnership - formed by the four universities Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet (NTNU | Norway), University for Continuing Education Krems (UWK | Austria), University of Applied Arts Vienna (UAA | Austria) and Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC | Spain) as well as the renowned research institutes National Research Council - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-ISAC | Italy) and Ústav teoretické a aplikované mechaniky (ITAM | Czech Republic) - translates cutting-edge research on climate change and cultural property protection into a distance and blended learning programme for higher education teaching.

EU directives and guidelines are taken into account. The approach to preparedness for cultural heritage protection is based on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The stated aim of the project is to highlight and promote the importance of our cultural heritage as a resource for the future.

Our cultural heritage faces a number of risks. Climate change and the resulting natural disasters pose one of the greatest threats to cultural heritage and cultural landscapes in the 21st century. The joint EU-UNESCO initiative No. 7 'Heritage at Risk', ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) focusing in 2019 on the integration of cultural heritage in climate change mitigation actions, as well as a number of high-level EU-funded research programmes underline this fact. Following the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, the European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage identifies the holistic approach as one of the four principles for success and highlights the importance of cultural heritage as a resource for the future. The Croatian Presidency of the EU in 2020 has made the protection of cultural heritage from climate change its number one priority.

The fundamental academic need related to cultural heritage and its protection is to reconnect cultural heritage (tangible, movable or immovable, but also intangible) with society and to promote understanding of its significance, shared values and identities.

The aim of the project is to anchor cultural heritage protection in higher education and to create learning opportunities that will enable (future) generations to protect and preserve our cultural property and thus our identity for the future. This should contribute to a sustainable and constructive change of behaviour in dealing with cultural heritage. This is particularly relevant for the later professional lives of learners and teachers at universities, who will be empowered to build their personal future on our common past.

The main outcomes of the project are:

1. the development of an open access online course with no restrictions on access or enrolment; this focuses on:

• climate change and the related threats to movable and immovable cultural heritage and cultural landscapes
• sustainable measures for the protection of cultural heritage and cultural landscapes

2. a tested and evaluated concept for a transdisciplinary, hybrid summer university on cultural landscapes in climate change

The project is thus fully in line with the current challenge of providing high quality online learning opportunities (the importance of which was underlined during the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide), as well as with the current European incentives to mitigate climate change and to sustainably protect cultural heritage from the threats posed by this change.