The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and current plans to address climate change are not ambitious enough to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (The Nature Conservancy, April 2022). The final synthesis of the IPCC’s report is expected to be released in September 2022. Perhaps one of the most important additions is the first-ever inclusion of heritage within the assessment. Contributing IPCC Africa chapter authors, Prof Joanne Clarke, climate change and heritage researcher based at the University of East Anglia, and Dr Nadia Khalaf, MAEASaM’s Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Exeter, tells MAEASaM about this important inclusion.
This was an absolute coup. It was a unilateral decision that Co-ordinating Lead Author Chris Trisos made at the very first Lead Authors’ meeting. He just told the Co-Chairs of the IPCC’s Working Group II that the Africa Chapter would have a heritage section, and nobody objected. The Africa chapter has set the precedent for other Lead Author groups to follow, and we are very proud of what we have achieved. The next step will be to have heritage fully embedded in future IPCC special reports and Assessment Report 7.
Clarke and Khalaf were part of the research project on coastal African heritage sites published in Nature Climate Change (African heritage sites threatened as sea-level rise accelerates | Nature Climate Change) earlier this year. This provided the first study of its kind to examine the potential impacts of sea level rise on 284 African heritage sites as recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance.
The study indicates that 56 of the 284 identified sites are currently exposed to 1-in-100-year coastal extreme events including coastal erosion and flooding. The research further projects that by 2050 the number of sites threatened by coastal extreme events are expected to more than triple, reaching approximately 191 African heritage sites. According to Clarke and Khalaf:
Each site is expected to be impacted differently. For example, at the site of Meninx on the Island of Djerba in Tunisia, the hazard is flooding caused by extreme seas. For natural heritage sites, such as the Saloum Delta in Senegal, salination could become a major issue, while Sabratha in Libya is facing erosion, again due to more frequent extreme seas. Going forward, hazards to heritage caused by climate change will become more frequent. Many of these hazards are not yet an issue because they are infrequent and heritage sites have the ability to recover, but the more frequent the hazard event, the less time there is for the heritage site to fully recover, this leading to greater exposure to the same hazards and to increased vulnerability. Heritage managers need to be aware that what might now be periodic overtopping of a sea wall could become permanent inundation if the floods do not have the time to subside.
Asked how such climate driven hazards on heritage sites can be managed or mitigated, the authors make the following observations:
It is complex and requires joint thinking across a range of disciplines and expertise, including the presence and willingness of governments to engage at a national level. Some countries do not have the adaptive capacity to do anything to save their coastal heritage. Returning to Meninx on the island of Djerba, the site has not even been restored: that would have to be the first measure before worrying about sea defences. In West Africa where more frequent extreme seas are battering the coasts of Benin, Togo and Ghana, simple sea walls have been built. This will postpone damage to coastal heritage, but it is not a permanent solution. Other sites will probably be lost because the cost of saving heritage is often greater than its cultural and economic value.
Increasingly, intergovernmental bodies concerned with heritage and practice are recognising the unprecedented pace and scale of the climate crisis, not only in terms of its impacts on cultural and natural sites but also on the collective responses within the heritage sector as cultural institutions for climate action.
Climate action requires inter-disciplinary engagement. It is not enough for heritage experts or archaeologists to take up the climate action banner, they need to be working closely with climate scientists, engineers and modellers, and they need to be equal partners in those collaborations:
Slowly, we think that climate scientists are seeing the importance of working with humanities disciplines in order to solve some of the bigger questions, such as how we communicate the impacts to heritage from climate driven hazards. A key issue is that we need to be speaking the same language; currently we are not doing that. Within the humanities, language is often nuanced and speculative. This is not the case within climate science where, even when there is no certainty there will be a confidence statement alongside, for example, ‘sea-levels will rise by an average of 1m across the globe by 2100 even without any cut in greenhouse gas emissions’ (high confidence). In the humanities we would say, ‘it is likely that sea-levels could be 1m higher by 2100’, but you cannot say that within the climate change world as it is too speculative. The question is, who should change their language, if anyone? How do we communicate climate change in a way that works for all?
Expanding on the importance of building an integrative and inclusive voice for climate action in relation to heritage, both authors acknowledge that there is still a lack of data on the intangible qualities of African heritage sites as derived from local communities and through Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). For Clarke and Khalaf:
Sustainable approaches to climate change will only be achieved working with local communities, heritage bodies and stakeholders, by integrating local knowledge into our models and embedding climate action into existing in-country institutions protocol.