Climate Change Hazards for Heritage

Joanne:                Thank you, everyone who's joining us today. My name is Joanne Williams, and I sit on the Climate Change Adaptation Technical Conservation Department at Historic England. So, the research we're going to talk about today came about because of previous research that we've undertaken at Historic England with others, which actually included our project lead today, which was Helen Thomas. It highlighted that there was a lack of standardised terminology around climate change risk for Heritage and for recording climate change hazards impacting our heritage. The project was developed to assist the sector in creating, and sharing, and understanding as organisations develop, and test risk assessment methodologies. So on the call today — and I forced them all to come and bring me photos because you need to see their lovely faces — you'll be hearing from four of our speakers, and then we will open the floor to all of your questions.

So, Dr. Scott Allan Orr is a lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage. As an engineer with broad interests, his research primarily uses data-driven approaches to further understand and manage our environmental risks to heritage. He has a particular focus on the historic environment and climate change, and he leads the Heritage Environmental Risk and Aata Analytics Research Group.

Helen Thomas is our collaborative doctoral student between Historic England and UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage. Her doctoral research aims to develop a scalable methodology for conducting geospatial multi-determinant climate change risk assessments for the historic environment. Helen is part of the research group Heritage Environment Risk and Data Analytics at UCL and is an affiliate member at the UK Center for Moisture in Buildings.

Next you have my two colleagues, Kate Guest, as a senior policy adviser in the climate change team at Historic England's Policy Development Department. We have very long names, you'll notice. She's worked at Historic England and previously English Heritage for over ten years in various policy roles.

And last but no such least, Philip Carlyle is our Senior Data Studies Specialist at Historic England. He advises on the use of data standards and vocabularies in recording systems, and is the Chair of Fish Terminology Working Group. Since 2012, he has been a member of the Arches Project team developing open source software for cultural heritage. And I'm really hoping that Matt has now found Scott and that I can hand it over to Scott.

Scott:                    Thank you very much. I'm hoping that you can hear me. Fantastic. I have just a few slides to give an overview of the broad context of this work, and particularly on the topic of climate change and heritage. I think it will come as a surprise to few who are attending this webinar that climate change is a key risk to heritage in the 21st century, and I think particularly it's interesting to think about the relationship that climate change has with long-term changes, such as those that have often been of interest when it comes to environmental risk for the historic built environment, but as well as looking at the frequency and severity of extreme events.

So, when we talk about the risks of climate change, we need to recognize that there are many determinants that comprise that risk, and there's lots of different frameworks that we can use to look at risk in a comprehensive way. In this project, we looked at the framework for climate change risks developed by the IPCC, and in this framework there are four components of which hazards which are defined as the potential occurrence of a physical event that may cause damage are one of them. And that's what this vocabulary is focusing on. So, not looking at the exposure or the vulnerability of heritage as important aspects, nor the response. And the rationale behind the IPCC is that as a scientific group assembled by the United Nations to monitor and assess global science related to climate change, by aligning the way we speak about and think about climate change risks for heritage, we can better incorporate our work and our understanding into the summary of knowledge they produce through things such as the assessment reports.

So, why a standardised vocabulary? What is the benefit to a sector, to an organisation for doing this? One main one is that it improves our communication through a consistent understanding of what different terms mean and how we use them. In terms of how we think about data indexing and retrieval, so the way that we might store our understanding of the climate change risks for heritage, it streamlines this process. Knowing in even a single organisation the number of different systems and databases that are needed to underpin this information, things like GIS systems, documentation, softwares, this facilitates the interoperability of these different systems by having a standardised and controlled vocabulary when it comes to these climate change hazards. It also allows us to produce uniform documentation so that in the way that we produce guidance and produce reportings as well as publications on these risks, it allows us to have, again, that uniform documentation of the processes and procedures as well as the challenges facing the sector in this regard.

And particularly as many people will comment on, there is a lot of influence of AI and machine learning-driven approaches when it comes to broader aspects of pretty much our entire society. But particularly having standardised control vocabularies allows for these sorts of processes to be automated in a way that supports the way that these algorithms think about different challenges and opportunities. I'll hand over to Helen now to continue.

Helen:                  Hello. I'm hoping you guys can all hear me. Thanks, Scott, for that introduction. My name is Helen Thomas, and I was the project lead for the first project that we're going to be talking about today. This project with a six-month collaboration between Historic England and UCL, funded by UCL to clarify the terminology we use when we talk about climate change in the heritage sphere, to create a standard for calculating of hazards for heritage, and a method to record these hazards, which my colleague Phil will talk about at the end of the presentation.

When we're talking about heritage today, we're not just talking about built heritage. We're also talking about marine and underwater heritage, cultural landscapes and monuments, and archeological deposits. The hazard vocabulary we created is not specific to one type of heritage. It's arguably not specific to cultural heritage, and it could easily be applied to natural heritage as well. And while it was produced by two UK institutions, it's also not just focused on the types of climate change hazards we experience here in the UK.

By using the IPCC, we deliberately wanted to be international in our focus. And so when we get to the hazard list, you'll see that there are sections on tropical storms and snow and ice, things that we don't experience as much here in the UK.

But let's start by defining what hazards actually are, because they're often conflated and not just in the heritage sphere, with the ideas of impacts and drivers. And we can do this with an example. So, you can see here that we have a lovely corroding shipwreck, and we have a little marine archeologist who's gone down for a dive to see how climate change is impacting the wreck. Now, the diver is aware of high-level changes in oceanic systems caused by climate change, such as changing mean ocean temperatures and ocean acidity. And when they go down to do the inspection, they notice two impacts: damage from invasive species and corrosion of the metal elements. Now, these impacts may not be climate change-specific. Climate change is a risk multiplier. It exacerbates issues that may be preexisting. So when we talk about climate change impacts and hazards, while some of them may be completely new, we may be seeing new species that are causing new types of damage, others are climate change-specific because of the rate of change and intensity of this change, and that is what makes them different from natural hazards.

So, a diver has gone down and they know that there are changes, large changes in the system. These are called drivers. and the IPCC calls them climactic impact drivers or CIDs for short. And then, we have these impacts, which are the end results of climate change thing. In the middle we have climate change hazards. The climate hazards are caused by changing climactic impact drivers, and they in turn cause impacts. So, by creating a vocabulary of climate hazards, we wanted to create a link between the climate science of the IPCC and the consequences of climate change for heritage. So, in this example, we have changes to species distribution leads to invasive species, and acidification leads to corrosion.

Now, thankfully for us, a lot of climate scientists have come together and defined the climactic impact drivers. So the IPCC has a list of all of these. We don't have to do that. We've now defined a climate change vocabulary for hazards, but what we have not done is to create a vocabulary of climate change impacts. The reason for this is the impacts are heritage type and material specific. Basically, there are a lot of them that are more complex and we decided that we needed to do hazards first before we could do impacts.

To give another example of the difference between hazards and impacts, if we move from our shipwreck example to a type of natural heritage. So, here we have the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is not going to experience corrosion of the metal elements, but acidification, the hazard of acidification, is absolutely going to still be a problem. So the impact of corrosion, that was a problem for shipwreck. It's not applicable here, but the hazard acidification is still relevant and that's going to lead to different types of impact, such as die-off of certain species. So impacts are dependent on the type of heritage and hazards are not. And that's why we've got to define hazards to build this bridge between climate science and climate impacts.

So, the IPCC defines climate impact driver types and climate impact driver categories. There are seven types and 33 categories, and I’ve bolded of the two categories that we've introduced so far, mean ocean temperatures and ocean acidity, which unsurprisingly can be found in the open ocean section. Now, this may look really small on your screen, and don't worry, there's not a test at the end. I won't be asking you to define all the climate impact drivers. There should be a link in the chart that my colleague will post to the research report that this is from. The IPCC publishes quite lengthy research reports, over 2000 pages long. So, if you want to look at the information that's behind this, I've told you the page number. So, it's on page 1776.

But the reason I wanted to show you this is threefold. The first is to show that this is the structure that we've adopted to find climate change hazards. So, all of the hazards in our vocabulary are connected to a CID category, which is then in turn connected to a CID type. So, we've worked within this structure. Second, what I want to emphasise is that CIDs cover both long term changes in the Earth's climate and short term episodic events. So if you look at the open ocean category, yes, we have mean ocean temperatures, which is very slowly is increasing in many places. But we also have marine heatwaves which are rapid periods of change. And you'll see this pattern repeated in the other types. So, if we look at heat and cold, yes, we have main air temperature, but we also have extreme heat and cold spells so that those episodic short term extreme events are also in the vocabulary. This is important because these two different types of change, long term and short term, have different impacts for heritage. Third, by using the structure of the IPCC, we are able to directly link impacts to their root cause in terms of climate change.

So, we have seven CIDs, 33 CID categories, and we've defined 52 hazards. Now, the hazard vocabulary exists in multiple formats. Pretty much none are conducive to sharing on a static slide in a webinar. So, what I'm showing here is a screenshot from the Excel sheet. The Excel sheet is a master sheet, and it's divided into sub tabs for each of the CID types. Here we're looking at mean ocean temperatures, we're staying with that oceanic example. And you'll see that we've defined five primary hazards for this category. These are biological growth, water temperature, ocean currents, wave action and species distribution.

Each of these terms has a scope. Now, the scope note is a definition and also a description of how the terms can be used. And it also has an “also known as” category, which provides alternate terms or alternate spellings. You'll then see that there are key related hazards. Key related hazards can be a subtype of the primary hazard, but they can also have a causal relationship and be hazards in their own right. So here, species distribution is related to water temperature, but it's also a primary hazard in its own right. If you look at the Excel workbook, my colleague Matt has shared a link to Zenodo, where the workbook can be downloaded. You'll see that that terminology can sometimes exist in multiple places. The species distribution is one hazard that we've defined, but you'll find it in, I think, about 18 different places across various CIDs, as it's connected to multiple climactic impact drivers. In the final vocabulary, it only exists once. So, if you look at the PDF and you look at the list of the vocabulary terms, you'll only see it appearing once. The final column of the Excel sheet shows example impacts from these hazards. Now, as I said, we've not defined impacts. These are just here as examples of what could happen from these hazards, and kind of to show the differentiation between hazards and impacts.

Now, there are many different available formats for the vocabulary. And which, depending on what you want to do with the vocabulary, will kind of depend on how you want to access it. So, if you just want to have a quick look at the vocabulary, then you can download the PDF from Zenodo. Zenodo is an open access data repository, and there you can download the hierarchical and alphabetical PDFs and have a quick look at the 52 hazards, and also the CIDs. If you want the full picture, then you're going to want to look at the Excel sheets. This gives you the structure, so it shows you how the hazards are related to the various CIDs. So, for example, you only manage heritage assets on the coast. Then if you go to the Excel workbook, you can look at the Coastal tab and only look at the hazards that are relevant for that section. If you only manage heritage assets, you know, in Antarctica, well, that's really cool. And we have a snow and ice section, and you can just go look at the hazards related to that. The full version is the Excel workbook. This is always going to be the most up to date version, and we generate the PDFs and the vocabulary from this.

If you're a heritage manager and you work with fish vocabularies and linked data, and fish is the form and information standards and heritage, then the vocabulary was always meant to be a fish vocabulary and it's published as linked data on the Heritage Data website. And it will be eventually added to the fish website. It's not there right now. So, if you want to use this vocabulary as link data and to tag your sites against it, then you can download the link data and the various links that are in the chat.

If you spent the first kind of 20 minutes in the webinar thinking, “I'm not sure if I should be here,” maybe you just want to get your lunch, then I would direct you towards the research report. This is a very high level report. It provides a background to the project, its methodology and definitions, and an abridged version of the vocabulary as an appendix. So, that's where you can get a start, an idea of the project, see what we've done, the limitations and the vocabulary. You can then move and look at the PDF to see all the terms, and then look at the Excel workbook to see how they relate to each other. And then, the final level, look at the data, if that's how you use fish vocabularies.

Now, if you followed some of the links and you've downloaded the workbook, and you've had a look at some of the terms, you'll realise that none of the terms have the word change in it, which is perhaps slightly unusual for a climate change vocabulary. So we've not said change in species distribution, we've not said increasing temperature or decreasing precipitation. That's because we deliberately did not want to assume a direction of change. While, we may be experiencing decreasing precipitation over the next 50-80 years here in the UK that is not the case everywhere. This is an international vocabulary, so we have not dictated how climate change hazards will change. There's also uncertainty in the climate change projections, and we wanted to acknowledge that. And just because there's no change doesn't mean there isn't going to be damage to heritage assets. You know, heavy rainfall is still bad, whether it’s getting worse, increasing.

However, the IPCC does define how they see hazards changing. So, we have from the IPCC the six ways that hazards can change, and we recommend that if you're looking to do an analysis of how hazards can change, you can use these dimensions as kind of a way to think about this. So, all the hazards vocabulary that we've defined doesn't have change in the terminology, and thus, for example, if you were looking at the hazard of freeze-thaw cycles, well, here in the UK, we're actually going to see a decrease in the frequency of these cycles because of our warming climate. But we're also going to see a change in terms of their seasonal occurrence. So that's one way that you can take a hazard and then look at its various dimensions of change.

Now, like any research project, there are limitations to what we have done. I don't really think that it being UK specific is a limitation, but it does mean that some of the terms that we have defined are not going to be applicable in all of the policy contexts. So, here in the UK we have the national adaptation program. They have a climate hazard of extreme weather. Extreme weather is not a climate hazard in the vocabulary that we've defined. We think it's quite a broad category. And so we've subdivided it into various types of extreme wind speeds, tornadoes, dust storms, etc.. This does mean that there might be some translation in specific policy contexts. We've also only defined it in English so far. We are very open to talking to those who might want to create the vocabulary in multiple languages. The CIDs, because they're published by the IPCC, they exist in all of the UN languages. But we haven't worked to do this. There's also, as I said, no vocabulary for impact assessment now. And finally, humidity is a hazard that's particularly important for those of us that work in heritage. But if you look at a lot of the climate science, it's actually often overlooked. Though humidity is not a CID as determined by the IPCC, we've defined two humidity-related hazards, average humidity patterns and rapid humidity fluctuations. And we connected them to multiple CIDs. But it doesn't have quite the same prominence at the CID structure as we might have liked,for those of us who work in heritage. And that is one of the limitations of working within the IPCC context.

So, if we go back to our shipwreck question, our shipwreck example, there are two levels that this works at. So, you can look from your impacts, and you connect them to your hazards, and then connect it back up to the IPCC climate science, to the climactic impact drivers. But you can also work top down. You can take the climactic impact drivers, and then you can think about the hazards that we've defined in the vocabulary, and then connect those to the impacts we're seeing on the ground. So, if we think of this top level down, quite handily, the IPCC publishes the summary tables for each geographical region of how CIDs are expected to change into the next- to 2100. If you look at this- and this is, again, there's more details on this in the research report and a higher quality version of the image. This lets us look at what CIDs are increasing, which ones are decreasing, and the confidence level for these changes. We can then link these directly to the hazards we need to be most concerned with in our geographical region, and that lets us quickly ascertain which hazards are most pressing, and it lets us rely on the IPCC climate science. So, we don't really have to reinvent the wheel here.

So, after we created this vocabulary, we wanted to explore what data was available. So yes, the IPCC has high confidence that extreme heat episodes are going to increase, and that leads to the hazards of heat waves and humidity fluctuations in our vocabulary. But do we have the data to investigate this further? Do we know where this is going to locate? So what's going to happen geographically? Do we know how the frequency is going to change? And so, this leads us to a second project which my colleague Kate will be talking about. I'm very happy to answer the questions at the end of the presentation on the vocabulary, but I’m now going to hand over to Kate Guest, who is a senior policy adviser in Historic England’s Climate Change Team, to talk more about data sources for these climate hazards. Over to you, Kate.

Kate:                     Sorry, everyone. Yeah, my name is Kate. And apart from wrecking the presentation slides, I am here to talk about a project that runs simultaneously with the hazard vocabulary work, and which aimed to identify current data and tools to understand and communicate information about climate change hazards. Historic England commissioned JPA Consulting to carry out the project and produce a research report for us, and the link to that research report is going to be added to the chat. Now, this project used the hazard vocabulary that Helen has been talking about, both in terms of the climatic impact drivers and the specific hazards identified, to identify and review available data for some of the key hazards for heritage in the UK. As Helen alluded to, some of the hazards in the vocabulary aren't that relevant, or at least not yet within a UK context. So, some hazards like tropical cyclones were scoped out of this work. The project also reviewed climate change risk assessment methodologies from the sector and other comparable sectors to help us understand more about ongoing activity and those related organisations. And there's a lot more detail about this in the research report. But today I'm just going to focus on the main aspects of the project, which was about data resources.

So, within this project, we basically wanted to get a much better idea of the available data and tools, both for Historic England's own ongoing analysis of climate change risk, and also to help us signpost resources to other organisations in the sector who are starting to analyse climate change risks to their assets at various different spatial scales. I think what we found so helpful about this work is that it's not so much that we're not aware that there is a lot of data out there or indeed use some of it already, but there are so many organisations involved in developing climate change data and resources and tools, and they're all at different scales and different formats and so on, that we found it really useful to have this all set out in one place, along with some analysis of which datasets and tools are likely to be particularly useful from a heritage perspective. And I think this is a key step for us to kind of view the most up to date information and start to consider that through a heritage lens, and to then signpost available resources to others and start to help people take action to then adapt to these risks.

Now, you'll hear me saying data and tools a lot in this presentation, and just to kind of clarify, data in this project, we're kind of thinking of as a sort of facts and statistics that you can access and download, for example, as GIS or view it through data visualisation and web browsers, whereas tools are more resources that you can kind of interact with and manipulate yourself to produce sort of different outcomes. And so, I'm going to talk about some specific tools at the end of the presentation, and some of those allow you to consider multiple hazards across several different climate change scenarios. And indeed, some of them allow you to tailor and download your own maps that might be useful for whatever spatial scale that you're working in.

The Research Report sets out in detail the methodology that was used by JPA for the desk based assessment and targeted stakeholder interviews that were carried out to identify the datasets and tools. And this information was then added into a catalogue that was presented to us along with that research report.

So, the project identified data and tools that were both publicly available and behind paywalls. But because we want to be able to use this piece of work to signpost lots of different organisations to different resources, we only asked for sort of full assessment of the publicly available datasets and tools in terms of their strengths and weaknesses from a heritage point of view.

So, the project identified 38 different tools. Not all of those, as I say, have been assessed because some were behind a paywall and a couple are only accessible to research institutions. But the data catalogue gives information on the hazards that they cover, the frequency of updates, spatial scale, relevance to particular heritage asset types, for example, marine heritage, landscapes, buildings and archeology. And then whether it might be suitable for a kind of general or more specialised technical audience. And when I come on to talking about some of the different tools, you'll understand, some of them are quite easy to use and fairly, fairly basic in the things that you as a user can do, and some of them are a lot more complicated and require a bit more kind of expertize to get your head around.

And then in terms of datasets, the project identified 74. And again, the data catalogue sets out full information on the hazards and climatic impact drivers that these cover and the format of the data, for example GeoTIFF or net CDF, relevance to different asset types, and their strengths and weaknesses from a heritage risk assessment point of view. For both of these, the catalogue provides a link to the datasets and the tools where you can find them.

So, the graphic on this slide, which is probably a bit small on your screen, so apologies for that, because there are quite a lot of hazards to that. The report basically gives an indication of the number of data sources available for each of the climate hazards that were scoped into the project. So at the bottom of the graph, you can see that hazards, for example, average temperature patterns and humidity, average precipitation patterns, high temperature events and fluvial floods have a lot of data sources available. Some of them have 30 plus included in 30 plus different sector datasets or tools. And then at the top of the graph, the fewest data sources are for hazards including wave action, water table and marine hazards such as ocean salinity. So I think for some hazards, this might indicate a gap in information. But for others, it's also likely to indicate that there is one main source of information. So it doesn't necessarily mean, as you're going through it, that there’s a lack of confidence in the actual data itself.

So now I'm just going to take a couple of minutes to run through some of the available tools, which range from those that give you just a really good baseline understanding and an overview of risk for people who are maybe just starting out considering what their climate change risks are likely to be, to some or more complicated ones that you can use and manipulate in a lot of different ways to kind of cut the data in different ways.

So, the first one is the local climate adaptation tool. This was developed by the University of Exeter, European Center for Human Health, Cornwall Council, an organisation called Then Try This, and the Alan Turing Institute. And it was co-designed by partners from local government, the National Health Service and the emergency services. Now, this provides a really good, as I say, way in, I think, for some of the baseline information around hazards. It's not heritage specific and the focus is on sort of public health and communities and risks around there.

But what it does really do is give you a sort of dashboard of information for two different climate change scenarios, midrange and a worst case scenario. And you can pick your county. And then when you do that, it gives you a range of different hazards that you can click on. So it covers heatwaves, uncontrolled fires, air quality, flooding and coastal erosion. And then when you click through, it kind of filters you down to available local data on each hazards. And then a summary of impacts to public health and communities for these hazards in a particular area. So it's to say, although not specific to heritage, it does give a really good way in if you're starting to think about this sort of thing and it could point to where to go for other sources of information.

The second one is the UK climate hazard mapping for heritage, which is obviously a tool specifically for Heritage, and aiming to provide an overview of risk to particular areas. The project to develop this was led by the National Trust and developed by sustainability Advisors 3Keel, and it's hosted on the National Trust’s GIS web portal. It's been a key step in developing kind of heritage sector understanding of exposure of sites to hazards. It was a kind of toe in the water for a lot of us in sort of starting out in this sort of work. And the project also involved the other organisations on the slate. So, the other UK heritage agencies, ourselves, CADW, Historic Environment Scotland, the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland, as well as the English Heritage Trust and National Trust for Scotland.

The mapping is hosted by the National Trust on their website, and it allows users to see a five kilometre hex grid map of the UK to get a broad idea of its kind of current baseline visualisation and a future visualisation of hazards, including overheating and humidity, storm damage, landslides, soil heath, high and low temperature events, rainfall, urban heat islanding, which is an interesting one to look at and wind speeds. So this map is a flagging tool to identify the most likely hazards over a relatively localised area, to trigger conversations and target and more detailed assessment. It's not intended to act as a definitive list of hazards for individual sites, but it has been important to various organisations, and is obviously informing very much the developing National Trust approach to adaptation at their own sites.

And then finally, the last tool, which is one of the more kind of complicated ones to use, but it is very comprehensive and covers a lot of different climate change scenarios. Is the UK Climate Risk Indicators Explorer. It provides information on future changes to indicators of climate risk across the UK at a variety of scales. So from district level right up to the national, depending on the level that you're interested in. And it uses the UKCP projections produced by the Met Office. It covers several different climate scenarios. As I say, a lot of different climate hazards, extreme weather hazards, average temperature, maximum minimum temperature and so on. And what makes it a little bit tricky to navigate, I think, is that not all data is available at all spatial scales. So it takes a little bit of time to work out what is going to be relevant to you and what the dashboards are telling you. It’s a little bit more complicated than some of the other ones. But the good thing about it is that you can plot your own maps using hazards that you want to consider, and a spatial scale that's relevant to you.

So, for example, if you have a portfolio of sites across a particular area, you can then download that locational data into your own system and use it from there, which is quite a good feature. So, I think the links to this have been shared in the chat. I think one of the links might be broken and if that's still the case, I will find a better one and try and fix it. The information from the data catalogue that I was talking about is also available on Zenodo to be downloaded as the full Excel spreadsheet.

We're now working to kind of summarise a lot of this information into some key resources to signpost to from our website in a climate change hazard section that we're in the process of developing to make use of this and also the hazard vocabulary. And then we’re also using both of these pieces of work to develop our key messages about heritage risk for the next UK climate change risk assessment. So that's the kind of next step for me.

So from these projects you can see that we have quite a clear idea of hazards relevant to heritage and some key data sources to analyse them. How then can this be useful for those actually on the ground managing the historic environment? I'm going to hand you over to my colleague Phil Carlisle, who will tell you a bit more.

Phil:                       Thanks, Kate. So there's no point in having a vocabulary if we can't use it. And so, the first thing we've thought about doing is developing a module for the Arches software. We are developing free, open source software for inventories for HERs at the moment and Arches for HERs will be one of the first implementations of the  Arches platform to include climate hazard recording for archeological sites, buildings, undersea scapes, etc. What that's going to look like is some form of recording form.

So, the scale of this is obviously really small, even I can't see it. But it's basically a recording format that allows you to say what kinds of hazards are going to affect the heritage, what the type of heritage is affected by. You'll be able to draw a polygon that the hazard is associated with on your GIS, and then that will link to any sites or monuments that fall within that polygon. And so you'll be able to say coastal erosion in north Norfolk, and use that polygon of the hazard of coastal erosion in north Norfolk as your map filter to bring back all of the affected monuments, sites, archeological sites, buildings, wrecks, submerged landscapes, etc., and tag them with that hazard so that you can then say, okay, we know that these buildings are likely to be affected by coastal erosion in North Norfolk. It's early days at the moment, we've only just started thinking about how to develop the recording forms. Although the first iteration is already live in our sandbox for the National Marine Historic Environment Record.

So, that will be the first implementation that we make available. Arches for HER, we are going to have to do some more development on the module to get it ready for launch- Arches for HER is very likely to launch in September, but it will be the next version on from that, that recording form within arches. Obviously, if you're not using Arches then you won't be able to use that particular recording module. But of course, if you're using other software, you can use that structure, the same structure, and we can provide that structure and we can provide the vocabulary that you can then build into your own software. So, it's anticipated that we'll be able to start using this within the year.

And that's really all I've got to say for now. Obviously… Sorry, I've completely lost my thread.

Joanne:                It’s the first day after a bank holiday, Phil. You're fine.

Phil:                       It is. It’s the first day after a bank holiday, and my head has been so full of- it doesn’t have any space for this. But yeah, pillboxes. They're a real issue, and they're going to be affected by coastal erosion. And I love pillboxes. So, on that, I’ll end.

Scott:                    That's absolutely marvellous. Thank you so much, Phil. We're going to move on to the Q&A session now. So thank you, everybody, for all your questions, which we will work our way through. Please do feel free to add any more questions as they occur to you in that central chat area, if you will, questions for the presenters. And I'll also invite our presenters to turn their webcams on so we can actually put a face to the name. Which would be absolutely marvellous. Thank you so much.

Phil:                       God help us all.

Joanne:                Well done, you guys, for the fact that that's your first time presenting on a technical Tuesday,  you did fantastic. So, we've got a few questions. Please put them in the chat box. We've got about 15 minutes. And I'm hopefully going to pull out who I think they're most relevant for. So that'll make our lives a bit easier. So first question, Scott and Helen, is this piece of work designed to interface with the Climate Vulnerability Index? If not, could it?

Helen:                  I'll take this one. For those who are not familiar with the CVI of the Climate Vulnerability Index, it's a rapid assessment methodology for world heritage developed by Invesco. In a CVI process, you identify three key hazards that are relevant for the site from a list of, I think, 12 or 13 hazards, which they call drivers.

So, the short answer to this question is no, because we have 52 hazards and they have 13. And that's not like, we’re bigger than that. But, you know, there's a reason that CVI has done quite broad categories for their hazards because of what they were trying to do with high level assessments. And we didn't do that. We wanted to kind of try to do all the hazards that we could find. And, so there are overlap of the terminology. For example, I think they talk about wind, and we have a mean wind speed hazard terminology. So I definitely think there could be a translation, but it wasn't defined. We haven't used those terms. Because of the high level focus to CVI, it doesn't necessarily allow you to do some kind of analysis that Phil has just explained that we can do, create polygons and tag all the sites that are inside of it with the climate hazards. And because of our scope, we wanted to kind of expand the list of hands that we have now. So, no.

Joanne:                Very detailed. It’s always nice, isn’t it? So I think, following on from that, it's quite interesting and I know the answers could be no, but obviously maybe it's next steps. So, for risk modelling, how are we going to address multi hazard or multi vulnerability metrics? And I know you guys touched on this a little bit, so is this our next step and how do we do it?

Helen:                  I can start, if you don’t mind. I'll start with multi vulnerabilities. So as Scott said, there's multiple risk determinants in how we think about hazards. We have not looked at vulnerability in this kind of way of creating vocabulary. The model that we built for Arches is not climate change hazard specific. It's a climate change recording model very deliberately because there is intention that in the future we could include vulnerability into that. So vulnerability is defined as the sensitivity of a heritage asset to climate change. So that has issues like the condition of the heritage asset, the age of the heritage asset. So in the future, yes, we could build a form and define those terms and have that kind of come into it, and then we could see how the hazards and vulnerabilities interact. Not a piece of work that we have done right now. in terms of multi hazard, absolutely. The hazards don't exist in silence. We have compounding hazards. We have cascading hazards. The IPCC publishes their recommendations on this. These hazards can absolutely overlap and interact. How they act as risk multipliers, that is kind of a next step. We have done the first step into creating terminology, looking at how they act upon each other and how we can incorporate that into a big risk framework. It’s, kind of, to come, not in the scope of what we did for this project.

Joanne:                It is one of these bigger things. We've all worked together quite a lot over the last 18 months actually, and we always discuss this about, you know, you have one hazard, and you have another hazard, and then you have everything that happens after it. And then, it's not that simple, because you've then got different building materials, and that material is going to react differently, and we don't have the information. And then we've got new materials coming in. And Scott also sits on the UKCMB, which is the UK Control of Moisture of Buildings. And when we start to think about energy efficiency alongside climate change, that then brings about even more hazards, because you're going actually, if we put that material in, is that going to be impacted another way? I don’t know if any of you want to come in on that, otherwise, I can ask you another question.

Scott:                    I was just gonna say very briefly, I think it’s something that was also picked up in the JBA work, but more generally from the perceptions of looking at what’s done, I think the main thing for looking at anything which tries to combine hazards or vulnerability in a kind of complex way is to be transparent about how that analysis is done. So, I think, as much as it's tempting to want a climate change risk indicator, which sort of does all the modelling and evaluation, and then come out with something that you can look at and figure out what to do,  I think the transparency is quite important for understanding that there are areas, or different context,s or different stakeholders who are going to want to know more or less about certain kinds of risks. And so, that transparency is essential to underpinning that.

Joanne:                Yeah, that goes back to what Helen was saying about, you know, this is specific for England, it might not be relevant for other places. So I suppose, Phil, there's a question for you on here. Will Arches only allow hiking hazards for English heritage, monuments or sites, or will we be able to tag Welsh or Scottish sites as well?

Phil:                       Well, the vocabulary is, you know, nonpartisan. Anyone can use it. As Helen said, it's intended to be an international standard vocabulary for use. And whether or not, you know, whether or not Arches allows you to tag it in Welsh or Scottish sites depends on whether or not you're implementing it for Scotland and Wales. We're using it internally for various systems. As I say, we're developing Arches for HER for use by historic environment records. And those historic environment records could be anywhere in the world, and they could use this model. So yes, you can tag anything and anyone, but you've got to be using Arches, obviously.

Helen:                  Can I just add in here that those of you who use fish vocabularies before will be able to use it as you've done before. You can also submit candidate terms. So if you are using it somewhere else and we have missed your hazards, which is totally possible. I think we did pretty well on snow and ice with two Canadians on the project board, but we might have missed some of the aridity ones. You can submit candidate terms to us and we'll incorporate that into the vocabulary, and the emails to do that on the Zenodo page. If you follow the link to the description, we have two emails that you can contact. So, it's a living document. It’s a living vocabulary, absolutely. It can change as the needs of the sector change too.

Joanne:                No, that's really good. And someone just followed that up with a perfect thing, saying on the theme of transparency, what is the timetable for sharing fish terminology and LODs?

Scott:                    It's there. The LOD is already up. So you can just go to heritagedata.org and it's available for use. We are making… My colleague Paul, who is actually on the call now, is going to be posting the alphabetical and hierarchical documents onto the Heritage Standards Fish website later this week, if not later today, this week. And I'll be adding the RDF file to that site as well so that you can download the whole RDF file and use it at your leisure, and however you want to, really.

Joanne:                Paul has very helpfully just fed them into the chat, saying, “We’ll be with you very soon.”

Helen:                  Do you want to look it up?

Joanne:                They're already on the Zenodo. So most of it is already accessible.

Phil:                       You'll be overwhelmed with how many ways you can access this vocabulary.

Joanne:                Is that a common theme of climate change? That actually is just a bit overwhelming?

Phil:                       Ramming it down people’s throats.

Joanne:                I hope not that forceful of a matter, but you know, we try. so let's just try and pick through some more of the questions. So, we've got one here for Helen or Scott. You'll probably be able to answer this. Has there been any discussion with CROSS, which is the collaborative reporting, the Safer Structures UK?

Scott:                    No.

Helen:                  That's fine. I had to quickly Google them. If you want to call and you're from. Cross and you want to talk about it, come chat.

Joanne:                So, I quickly googled them, and they do have representatives from [45:00 inaudible]. And from a technical point of view, Historic England, we do work alongside all of those technical panels as well. So we might be inadvertently working with them. But that's fine. Like Helen said, if we're not involved and you're on the call, please get in touch. We'd love to collaborate here. So this is quite a bit of a quirky one.

Kate, as planning and policy, you might be on this. I'm wondering how this understanding of climate risk will feed into both monument management and impact assessment. It's clear that we are dealing with a dynamic situation, so assuming that our baselines will be stable in the long term is going to be very problematic, and very similar for the heritage at risk registers as well.

Kate:                     Yeah. In terms of the baseline, I completely agree. I think one of the things that we found out, particularly in the GBE project, is just how dynamic a picture this is. And obviously what we've published at the moment is a static, it was a point in time exercise. I suspect that it's something that we might want to update. At least the format that we have stuff in is updatable. I don't have any timelines for that, but I definitely think that it is something that we're going to have to consider. And not just as the heritage sector. I think any organisation who's working with climate data is going to have to face that problem. So I just don't have an answer for the question,  but I think it is definitely an excellent point. It is something that I'm painfully aware of whenever we start talking about these things.

Joanne:                I think it is a painful conversation. But it's an enjoyable one. We're all quite big problem solvers on this call, so we always love to keep on challenging ourselves and we'll see what we can do.

Kate:                     Do you want me to answer the heritage at risk one?

Joanne:                Yes, that would be great.

Kate:                     Again, I don't have a timetable for that. But yes, we are looking to sort of work out the best way for the vocabulary, in particular to find- to provide a kind of framework to… To indicating climate change risk and climate change hazards being an impact on heritage at risk sites. So it's kind of early days with that project, but it is something that we are in the process of doing.

Joanne:                See, lots to come out of Historic England, isn't there? Scott, did you want to add on something?

Scott:                    I just wanted to add back to the question about the dynamic situation and that. I think there's two things which could be relevant there, one of which is thinking about designing climate risk assessment as an approach. So, I mean, as much as people might gather the idea, I think a lot of that is, you know, building in programmatic approaches or structured ways that when the inputs change, when the baselines are reevaluated, when you have newer, higher quality data that you can actually use that in a way that doesn't mean going back to the start and having to build it again. A lot of that relies on the experience of being able to do that, but I think that's one approach that could really help. And as well, I think it's tempting to do a risk assessment now and then assume that will give us the answers to what we do next. And actually, I think it's much more interesting to think about what the different pathways or options are over, for example, the 21st century.

So what does that look like, if you think when it gets to this stage, we will do this? And one of those stages could be once we know enough about that. So I think thinking about these, the various options, and not thinking that doing something now will tell us what we need to do for the next 20, 50, 100 years. But being a bit more dynamic to respond to the dynamics of the situation.

Joanne:                No, you're totally right. And the thing with climate change is that actually we're going to see a change imminently, and then we're going to see a change in, say, ten years, and then we might see a change in 100 years. And actually, it goes to- someone's asked about, you know, is there any measures that we wouldn't accept as Historic England? And actually, the principle of conservation is about the management of change. So, you know, the whole point of- if you've got to change because of a hazard, you need to justify that. You shouldn't come up with one solution. It should be like, actually, these are five solutions we could do, but this material is no longer available or it's not appropriate because we're going to see extreme wind driven rain events. And it is having that kind not being short sighted and the awareness of what we're going to do with our buildings, and what we're going to do with our assets. And that's really important. And I think all of us, we've all had these conversations where we go, what about this? And then you go, but there’s that impact, and that impact. And we're constantly changing. The data we've currently got available, it might be limited in some facets, but it's going to continuously improve as people like Helen and Scott continuously work on systems like this, and we will start to find that actually you'll have better data in five years than you did as of today.

Did any of you want to come in on that point, or do you want me to go find more questions? We have four minutes left. No, silence. Kate or Phil, this might be for you. Is there a Historic England resilience and sustainability paper or guidance when it comes to the implementation of resilient measures? Oh no, it's totally for me. In flood damaged historic buildings. I should have finished reading the question, shouldn’t I? Yes, there is. It's currently with the environment agency. Just had some proofreading done and we hope to get it out this summer. So we'll be looking at flooding in particular and the impact that has on everything in general, all the way through to energy efficiency. It'll be a series of seven documents, three of which will come out in the summer, and then the others will come out later this year, beginning of next year. So that was easy. Is there a recommendation for a tool that will help us to predict how much larger our gutters are going to be on our church roofs?

Scott:                    I did actually put a response in the chat to this one, thinking it may not come up in the time we have left, but I've linked to a piece of work that we did a few years ago here in the Institute that actually looked at relatively simple modelling approaches for more extreme rain events and found that maintenance of gutters, as they are, often was the key rather than resizing. Obviously that might not apply to all situations. But that approach, if you have a look at that paper, I'm happy to be contacted about it, is a relatively simple model to look at gutter sizing and extreme rain events in the UK.

Joanne:                Such a big hazard as well. Because not only as we know, if you don't maintain them you get very wet walls that are then not energy efficient, but also one of our biggest maintenance challenges. We've got 2 minutes left. Have I missed any questions? So, this thing, as soon as someone answers your question, it jumps up through the thing. It’s quite fun. So, some Historic England monuments are protected by failing coastal RMA assets who may not have funding to maintain the defences. Does this work look at these types of risk and how to help RMAs?

Helen:                  No. I think that, in the future, there definitely has to be more that we need to do to build a kind of risk framework that is dynamic enough to be able to take an idea of maintenance and condition. [52:21 inaudible] maintain, [52:23 inaudible] whether there’s funding. That is absolutely going to change, how climate change is going to impact heritage assets. But we need to be able to agree on the terminology that we’re using first. And so the first that we needed was to kind of start defining our terms and our frames of reference. And then, absolutely, this is something on all of our minds, how we kind of go forward from this, and start thinking about how we create a metric that combines different risk determinants, and to see how we can look at risk on a broader, more [52:47 inaudible] scale. But for right now, unfortunately, this work does not help failing RMAs.

Joanne:                However, I think all of these questions have now told us like phase two, three, four, five, six in the project.

Kate:                     Yes, we're not short of work to be getting on with, are we?

Joanne:                So, we are coming to an end. So I'm just going to ask each of you one last question. I'd like to know what your biggest lesson learned from this project was. I'm going to go from left to right as he's on my screen. So, Phil, what was your biggest lesson learned?

Phil:                       God. If you're gonna build a vocabulary, use it. That was my biggest lesson. Because we were going to build this vocabulary regardless, and we could have ended up with just a nice little paper and everything. But actually implementing it is going to be the key.

Joanne:                That's good. Kate.

Kate:                     Yes, that's a good question. Yeah, for me, I think it was about kind of, as we've touched on some of the- is the dynamic picture and the fact that there's just so much going on, there's so much changing, and the fact that we just need to kind of be on the ball with this, and can’t assume that work that we've that we've done is going to be, you know, applicable in however many years time. So I think it's about that kind of future proofing, what we do in future to make sure that, you know, these things are all taken into account.

Joanne:                Oh, that's interesting. Scott.

Scott:                    I think my main takeaway, the thing that I thought about was, how in building the vocabulary, we had to balance what was conceptually possible and then what would actually be realistic. And that's where I think the dovetailing with the JBA work, of what is actually realistic to be done, and what we need to know about in terms of assessing these risks, and how that means we develop the vocabulary was quite an interesting one. So thinking about three steps ahead, even though we're only here and trying to futureproof that in a way, was something I'll take away from that.

Joanne:                That's brilliant. And Helen, last but not least, as project lead.

Helen:                  Writing definitions is a horrible task, and I hope to never do it again. No, I think that really, we have to- the future proofing was very much- like, we had to think- we tried to run and do the risk stuff, and we were like, we haven't walked yet. And we needed to come up with our terms of reference first. And so that was really the aim of this project. And a big thank you for the project team who were incredibly helpful.

Joanne:                So, our takeaway is, for everyone on this call, make sure you can walk before you run, I think.

[END]