For Climate Change Risk Assessment we’ve worked in partnership with Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the British Geological Survey…
… to assess the environmental hazards on the Historic Environment Scotland estate.
We’ve been looking at flooding, coastal erosion and landslides and looking at what the impact of those might be.
Once we have that information we’re in a much better position to actually work out what we do about it and how we protect our sites.
Adapting to climate change, understanding how we’ll be impacted and figuring out what to do is a big job.
Through the Adaptation Scotland Programme we run something called an Adaptation Learning Exchange.
That brings together people who are working on adapting to climate change across lots of different organisations.
Historic Environment Scotland have been working with the British Geological Survey and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency...
.... to combine various natural hazard data sets into a database that has allowed us to assess risk from these hazards, like coastal erosion, across our whole estate.
British Geological Survey and Historic Environment Scotland are working together to combine our scientific areas of research and technological innovation.
The Climate Change Risk Assessment has allowed us to look at natural hazards in a spatial database...
... the first time this data has been pulled together Scotland wide to look at the impacts of natural hazards on the historic environment. It’s the first time that this has been done in the heritage sector.
The results from this first phase of our Climate Change Risk Assessment have allowed us to identify the sites that we believe to be most at risk from climate change...
... but they also allow us to prioritise conservation and maintenance work across the estate by selecting those sites that are most vulnerable.
In Culross we’ve been working quite closely with Historic Environment Scotland on a number of issues relating to helping knowledge base when it comes to looking after traditional buildings.
We’ve run a number of pilot studies in terms of energy improvements...
... as well as adapting some of the traditional details just to make the properties more resilient when it comes to dealing with increased weather events.
The advantages of working with other organisations are that we can share expertise, our knowledge and pool our resources...
... in order to combat the effects of climate change, which after all is affecting all aspects of society, not just the historic environment.
Dynamic Coast is a government-funded project aimed at identifying where coastal erosion is occurring on the Scottish coast.
The Dynamic Coast project is built upon partnerships and key to that is the partnership with Historic Environment Scotland and that’s moved on the analysis of erosion in Scotland quite substantially.
When people do share their knowledge and expertise and pool their understanding of climate risks it just results in a better outcome all round.
It helps us to learn and develop the way in which we assess climate risks in a much better way.
We have a window of opportunity here and working in partnership and pooling our resources with other organisations is enabling us to be prepared for the changing climate...
... and to make sure that we can conserve and maintain our historic buildings for the future.
'It’s got very similar characteristics to the original stone in the building and it’s performing very well and really giving us that sort of protection that we need.'
This is just the start of the process for us. We’ve now got a much better understanding of how climate change is going to affect our sites – but we need to do more.
For us that means more partnership working, looking at different risk factors and projecting further into the future so that we can prioritise our investment and our actions on our sites.