Webinar on the Historic Environment & Toolkits for Climate Resilience

Speakers: Dr Antony Firth, Mark Cannata, Hannah

Hannah: Thank you, Rachel, and welcome everyone. Good to see a lot of regulars coming back. This is our last webinar for 2020 but we will be back in the new year with more, so please do keep an eye out for those and as ever send us suggestions for topics that you might want to hear more about on the general historic environment and cultural heritage and climate change theme. This week we are carrying on one of the themes that we started last week with the last of the Culture X Climate webinar series and we are looking at the issue of climate resilience.

So I think we all know that the climate is going to change, is already changing quite significantly and there are a number of challenges that face us that we need to adapt to in the places where we live and work and in the wider landscape.

So we have two perspectives today, one from Dr Antony Firth from Fjordr who is going to talk to us about work that he’s been doing alongside Historic England and others looking at how understanding of the historic environment can help support and engage people in thinking about flood management at quite a large scale. Antony is a marine archaeologist by background and specialises in strategic and policy matters and has a longstanding interest in the archaeology of freshwater environments and the work that we’ll be hearing about today has developed over a number of years and is ongoing with some quite exciting collaborations which I think we will probably hear about a little later on in our series next year.

Mark Cannata is also going to talk to us about a slightly different approach looking at resilience and planning for resilience in the World Heritage Site of Modica and a tool that was developed for that context but has now evolved into something that is being applied more widely to look at how we can plan for resilience in our settlements and places in a way that takes account of the historic environment and we will hear from Mark second. I would ask, if you have any questions, please post them in the chat and I will try and pick those up. We should have plenty of time for discussion at the end so please do use that. Write them down as they occur to you in the chat and I will make a note of them for later on and please do share any thoughts, examples, webpages that you think might be relevant as we go through.

So, I think without further ado I’m going to hand over to Antony who is going to talk to us about historic watercourses, cultural heritage and climate change in river catchments. Thanks Antony.

Antony: Thanks Hannah. Good afternoon everyone. My name’s Antony Firth from Fjordr Ltd, a small consultancy based in South West England. I’m very grateful to Historic England for the opportunity to talk with you today as part of the Climate Friday webinar series and for funding the work that I’m going to be discussing with you, so largely Historic England-funded projects.

I’m going to briefly introduce a tool for better understanding the role of cultural heritage in adapting to climate change in river catchments. This tool has been developed by Emma Firth and myself at Fjordr over the course of two pilot projects for Historic England, one on the River Stour in Dorset and one on the River Culm in Devon.

The tool itself is quite straightforward, comprising a single GIS layer of polygons demarking places where human activities relating to the river have taken place and especially where those activities have changed the character of the river or floodplain. Because of the way we record them, we refer to these places as Historic Watercourse Polygons or HWPs.

Although quite simple, the tool is innovative on several counts. First, despite their centrality to human history, the heritage of watercourses is relatively understudied and certainly under recorded in England, which is something I looked at a few years back. Second, our methodology addresses whole catchments rather than specific places or types of heritage. On the Stour, we looked at the entire length of the main course of the river from source to sea. On the Culm, we looked at the complete catchment, inclusive of its tributaries.

The method is relatively rapid and strategic in character but the work shows that both catchments are packed with evidence of previous human uses and interventions. Third, the tool takes some fairly diverse sources; historic maps, LIDAR data, existing archaeological and historic records and synthesises them into a single, flat-file layer.

The principal outcome is intended to be easy to incorporate into the GIS workspaces of catchment managers so that it is always to hand. The polygons are intentionally inexact. They are intended to flag the presence of something that should be taken into account but they don’t pretend to indicate precise extent. Discrepancies and ambiguities from the sources will require further clarification if specific schemes or interventions are planned. Now, we expect this tool to be used in two principal ways: First, to inform the development of adaptation measures such as the construction of flood defences or the introduction of nature-based solutions. Second, to open up a channel for local engagement about the history of communities and their rivers over time as this is a relationship that is already changing and will change further.

Time doesn’t allow me to go into details about our results in each catchment but the tool certainly provides an evidence base about the relationship between cultural heritage and climate change and catchment. Of course, the tool highlights places where heritage might be at risk of damage from increased flooding and erosion. It also flags the potential for heritage to be placed at risk by adaptation measures such as the construction of physical flood defences. But the point I want to emphasise is the role that heritage through the use of this tool might play in altering the paradigm through which flood management is carried out.

In the latest UK Climate Change Risk Assessment dated to 2017, risks to communities, businesses and infrastructure from flooding and coastal change are at the top. They are identified as high risk and as a risk where more action is needed. A growing intensity of flood [INAUDIBLE] is already apparent. Flooding has very tangible impacts on daily lives. It also has major economic costs and effects on wellbeing that extend long after the water has receded. The government’s commitment to public expenditure on flood and coastal risks was already high, but following Storm Dennis and Storm George in February 2020, it was doubled to £5.2 billion in England over the next six years. Undoubtedly, flooding is at the sharp end of climate change, adaptation and resilience in England.

Fortunately, there is a clear direction of travel as well as funding to support it as set out in the Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Strategy, the FCERM Strategy adopted by the government in September. There is a lot in this strategy that is very good, including commitments to protecting cultural heritage, but as I’ve said, I’m less interested here in protecting heritage from climate change and climate change adaptations, I’m more concerned about how heritage can help inform and enable climate resilience within catchments. In this respect, the FCERM Strategy is more problematic because of deeply embedded assumptions about the character, the rigours and floodplains.

Briefly, the dominant approach is to see rivers and floodplains as essentially natural in character. There is of course an understanding that rivers and floodplains have been affected by human activities but the previous impact of people on watercourses is rarely spelled out, or is perhaps considered to be self-evident. The assumption seems to be that human interventions are relatively recent and discreet and that the clock can be turned back. This is very evident in policies such as the 25 Year Environment Plan as well as the FCERM Strategy and a whole host of documentation directed towards implementation. Much of the emphasis is on [INAUDIBLE] such as natural flood management, working with natural processes, nature-based solutions, river restoration, rewilding, “Stage Zero” and large-scale tree planting.

In contrast, it is widely appreciated in the archaeological community and among environmental historians that just like every other element of landscape, the character of rivers in England is a result of the interaction of natural and human factors. This interaction is understood to be extensive and to have considerable time depth, being a consequence not only of intentional interventions but also of large-scale land management practices reaching back into history. Some of these past ways of living with water appear to have been sustainable over many centuries. Their physical evidence represents traditional knowledge embedded in the landscape from which we might usefully learn. This is not an especially radical view but it is a very different understanding of rivers and floodplains to that which underpins the government’s approach to climate change and river catchments and which is driving billions of pounds of public spending.

And let’s get a few examples from our mapping of Historic Watercourse Polygons on the Dorset Stour and River Culm in Devon. First, water mills. People are familiar with these as 17th and 18th century buildings, but perhaps less so as complex and extensive watercourse interventions dating back 700 or 800 years and probably more. For example, the Kensham Mill on the Culm, Martin Watts has flagged the excavation of a 1.3km leat in the 1290s. This [INAUDIBLE] 13th century leat corresponds to the substantial leat that is still evident 600 years later. Elsewhere our HWP work shows of many locations that the apparently natural course of the river that is in fact a former leat and that the earlier river is now present only as a ditch or a boundary.

Water meadows are another form of human intervention. By “water meadow” I mean here the constructed forms of bed works within floodplains and catch works on hillsides. They date typically to the 17th and 18th century, involving a high level of capital investment and maintenance and generally going out of use in the late 19th century. In some places, there remains still a very obvious topographic feature, elsewhere they’ve been levelled or ploughed out but are still visible in LIDAR. The thing I’d like to underline here is how extensive they are. When bed works and catch works were in place, the flows of water and nutrients and sediment over a high proportion of the catchment would have been subject to control. Although neglected, the physical remains of these systems at ground level and sometimes below probably still have an effect in slowing the flow of catchment scales.

Constructed water meadows became common in the last 200 or 300 years but people were plainly using flooding and perhaps augmenting it for hay and grazing from much earlier times. On both the Stour and Culm, we’re confident that we have surviving physical evidence of floodplain meadows held in common that date back to the medieval period and perhaps earlier. We see their distinctive funnel-shaped [INAUDIBLE] linked to droveways and in some cases still subdivided into [INAUDIBLE] and tithe maps from the 1840s. Where their earlier flora survives, floodplain meadows have high nature conservation value, are an important carbon sink and actually depend for their character on temporarily storing flood water. But across Europe, 97% of these habitats were lost between 1930 and 1990. We’re working with the Floodplain Meadows Partnership to see if we can unpick the earlier extent and origin of these features, perhaps encouraging opportunities for their recreation, but at least demonstrating how for perhaps a thousand years, flooding was actually vital for people’s livelihoods.

Our last example is settlements. Repeatedly, our mapping of Historic Watercourse Polygons despite historic settlement in very close proximity to the floodplain… That’s not just settlements we can see now, it’s the deserted medieval villages and shrunken medieval villages in the floodplain also. And this is hardly surprising given that before pipes, cables and [INAUDIBLE], having a river on your doorstep would have been very handy for a whole range of domestic, agricultural and industrial services. Flooding must have been an inconvenience but not so much that you would give up the advantages all the rest of the time by settling somewhere else. As Historic England has been demonstrating, people created buildings in the past that were better able to cope with flooding than they are today. Materials and buildings were permeable so if they became wet they could dry out quickly. What we seem to be seeing in the historic landscape is that whole settlements were permeable too, open to flooding but perhaps quick to drain also. It’s only when settlements turned their backs on the water and built [INAUDIBLE] and embankments that water started to be trapped to cause longer term damage.

The dichotomy between perspectives of cultural heritage and catchment management raise some serious concerns. Climate change adaptations to address flood risk are already driving major interventions in watercourses. Although dressed in the language of nature, we are currently embarked on yet another substantial phase of human intervention in riverine landscapes. What might be the unintended consequences of this new phase of intervention? How might our successors regard its effects in 50, 100 or 200 years? Perhaps more pressing however, what opportunities to adapt and achieve resilience are being missed by failing to recognise that rivers reflect both natural and human factors over very long timescales?

Hopefully, Historic Watercourse Polygons might offer a useful tool to bridge the gap between the cultural history of catchments and policy that emphasises only nature. HWPs provided catchment managers with direct evidence of specific human interventions in rivers over many centuries which can be used to inform new schemes and to stimulate dialogue with local communities.

I’m optimistic about this tool because of our experience on the Connecting the Culm project in Devon. Connecting the Culm is developing and demonstrating co-creation methods in designing nature-based solutions to flooding and drought arising from climate change. Information about the cultural heritage of the Culm based on our recording of Historic Watercourse Polygons is feeding directly into discussions about the development of demonstration sites and the future management of the catchment. The intent of Connecting the Culm is still to achieve nature-based solutions, but I see no difficulty in working with natural processes, so long as we recognise that these processes occur within systems that are not wholly natural but are socio-ecological hybrids. In effect, nature-based solutions must be rooted in a fundamental understanding that people have been living with and changing the River Culm for millennia. This sense that local communities are part of the river’s past, not just a recent, unfortunate imposition, could itself play an important in engaging people living in the catchment, helping to achieve what the FCERM Strategy frames as “a nation ready to respond and adapt to flooding”.

To conclude, I hope that we can use this tool as a practical means to engage with a wide range of climate change adaptions in river catchments but I also hope that it might encourage some different conversations about adaptation and resilience where policy makers and scheme designers consciously adopt perspectives rooted in an understanding of the historic character of watercourses. I wonder if this might enable us to contemplate some new approaches to climate change in river catchments, perhaps even some new terminology and acronyms. Could we start offering cultural flood management by opening former mill leats to re-establish flood bank connectivity? How about working with cultural processes in local communities to build an economic case for cultivating [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] beds? Perhaps even re-culturing whole catchments to learn again the routines of mowing and grazing that create and maintain the rich flora of floodplain meadows.

This is of course a provocation. Maintaining a dichotomy between nature and culture is one of the causes of the climate emergency and by the diversity crisis so approaches and terminology that erase this dualism will always be preferable but in appreciation of the human time depth in other catchments is still largely absent in policy decision-making. This absence exacerbates problems and precludes solutions. If we’re serious about mobilising cultural heritage to address climate change in river catchments, then the simple tool offered by Historic Watercourse Polygons might provide a practical way forward.

I’d like to say thank you for your kind attention. So, once again, thank you again to Historic England for the opportunity to carry out this work and present it to you today. I have included some links here to our initial work on the Dorset Stour including a case study that looks at historic watercourses in terms of ecosystem services and natural capital. And I’m going to be talking more about our work on the River Culm next Thursday about the Connecting the Culm project engagement in local communities.

I just wanted to say also that as well as our work on the Stour and the Culm, we’re currently developing the approach in other catchments too to look at further aspects of climate change and resilience on the River Eden in Cumbria, and a UK Climate Resilience project led by the University of Liverpool and on tributaries of the Thames in Oxfordshire for the Floodplain Meadows Partnership. And I will of course be happy to answer questions either during the webinar or if you would like to drop me a line, so thank you very much.

Hannah: Thank you, Antony. That was a fantastic run-through of some really fascinating work. I was trying to post a few of the links there but we will be sharing those afterwards for anyone who’d like to follow those up and I certainly recommend that you take a closer look at some of those. If you have any question for Antony, please do type them in the chat and I will pick them up at the end after we’ve heard the next presentation and hopefully we can have a bit of a discussion around those.

So, I wanted to introduce Mark Cannata now hopefully from sunny Sicily. It’s sunny in Hampshire here which I think is the first Friday that I’ve had sunshine when hearing people around the world with lovely sunny weather. Mark is an architect and is a founder and chief executive of Kassandra, a decision support tool. So, Mark is going to talk to us a little bit about his experience of developing and working with Kassandra and some of the exciting projects that he’s been working on with that. So, please, Mark, over to you.

Mark: Thank you very much, Hannah, and good afternoon everybody. As Hannah said, I am an architect and conservation officer by trade and I’ve always had a strong interest in combining conservation and sustainability, so really heritage is where it all started from for us. So, you probably have become familiar with this graph, especially in the first lockdown about flattening the curve in terms of the COVID-19 contagion, but we thought it actually quite apt to use it also to talk about climate emergence. As you know, the current virus is just a product of climate change and of the encroaching of man-made environments on natural environments. So, if we consider Earth’s capacity as being limited, it’s obvious that we can’t continue as we have been doing in the past because it won’t be business as usual and extreme weather events, floodings and viruses, are just a product of this continuing overuse of Earth’s resources.

So, the Kassandra Project started off as an idea, an idea of what could we do as architects to improve the quality of life in historic environments and make them more resilient to climate change. Quite often we think of historic environments as being fixed in time when actually history teaches us that it’s a continuous transformation and to survive in the future, historic environments will need to adapt, will need to adapt to survive in a sort of Darwinian sense.

So, Kassandra acts as what is called an IDSS, an Integrated Decision Support System. It is there to allow people to make better choices and to try and turn historic cities into what these days we would be calling smart cities. The way it does this is actually try and get the really large quantities of data that we have nowadays and turn them into something manageable that then can be at the basis of decisions, so in that sense, decision support.

How does it work? Well, it’s based on the analysis of parameters that relate to the built environment in the first place. So, these 12 parameters range from anything like the water quality to air quality to information about buildings, heritage obviously, waste, security, mobility. So it’s actually a multidimensional research and design tool that uses simulation to effectively create a digital twin of the historic environment or any environment for that matter as we recently found out and create scenarios that then allow for tests to be made. What you see here, the 12 parameters are just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

If we consider a single parameter such as the environment and we expand it as a family tree, we have developed a system where we have several parameters for each of the virtual elements in the digital twin.

So we would represent by a three-dimensional biometric model the entire historic or build environment and that includes elements such as buildings, obviously, but also infrastructure and also tree. And then for each of these elements we assign a series of parameters which can range from all sorts of qualitative or quantitative aspects and each of these aspects is then scored using what we have defined as a resilience index.

Effectively you can have a resilience index for any element within the virtual twin which then cumulatively gives an overall resilience index to the entire city for instance. But also, conversely, it allows you to see where problems might be and prioritise spending in the areas that most need it. It’s areas where you get effectively more [INAUDIBLE] coming back.

So, on this slide we’ve highlighted just one aspect, in this case the flora -perhaps the text is not very clear- but flora, trees and for instance in this case we’re looking at the annual maintenance cost of a tree or the shading, gradings of a tree. So, other parameters that we assign to a tree might be the cost of purchase and planting, cost of replacement, cooling coefficient, impact on air quality, etc. Obviously, you’ll have seen these days it’s really fashionable to just plant trees in cities rather randomly –certainly it’s something that’s been happening here in Italy- sometimes without much consideration for is it the right approach. It is not always the right approach and it’s not the right approach if it’s not coordinated with anything else but clearly it is better than doing nothing perhaps.

But what we’re trying to do here with Kassandra is having an Integrated Decision Support System so whether if you plant a tree you will see obviously the effect that it has on air quality, you will also see the effect that obviously conversely it has on health, [INAUDIBLE] and on temperature and improving the local environment.

But also you’ll see the effect that it has on cost and on maintenance similarly with the sometimes less quantitative parameters of heritage. Kassandra started as really a way of representing historic cities and when we really just wanted to show buildings through the course of time and it started off with just age parameters with buildings that appeared under [INAUDIBLE] according to their age.

And then we realised that we could assign quite a number of parameters to the same models, and in this case we’re looking at the heritage parameter, so for instance you might have the level of protection, level of significance, the condition of the building and so on and so forth. And so even here, we can give heritage a scoring, a resilience index that then cumulatively gets summed up with the rest of index. And obviously this tree expands to look at a number of parameters in… The scribble that you see on the right-hand side is actually the tree opened up and it is a relational database so a database that is not just a genealogical tree that goes from father to son but also obviously sideways between the elements. So, every decision needs to therefore look at all the parameters together and this is really what Kassandra helps you to do.

The parameters aren’t fixed randomly but they are directly or indirectly related to the quality of life indexes that you see published each year by the OACD. And obviously some of them are directly related and you can see, for instance, the environment parameter that if you open it up has a sort of similar structure as the parameter that we were looking at earlier in the Kassandra parameter rating tool. So, if you go from right to left, you’ll be getting to the maintenance cost of a tree for instance, if you go from left to right you’ll be getting to the same point. So, what we’re saying is that with Kassandra we can directly influence the quality of life in particular environment. And really it is all about making the right decisions to achieve balance between all these various conflicting parameters in a built environment.

Some of you will be familiar perhaps with this diagram which we borrowed from the doughnut economy concept. So that effectively says that for a society to thrive we have to be somewhere between the social foundations, so having enough resources to effectively sustain ourselves and the environmental ceiling which is the maximum resources that a context or if we take it globally, Earth can sustain. So, to survive we have to be in the sustainable zone which is in-between the two limits and often we have an overshoot, especially in the western world, on use of resources and a shortfall sometimes in the developing world. So, what we do is we effectively, by placing the parameters in the doughnut model, we create a number of scenarios until we achieve a balance that is actually within the sustainable zone.

And so this is sort of a stop with the first analysis. This is a graph that shows you the process that we go through with Kassandra and it kind of mirrors what we often do on historic buildings for some aspects. So, the first is obviously acquiring the data.

Acquiring the data can be done via existing information such as maps or GIS for certain aspects and then obviously we move on to more sophisticated things like censors and that allows us to create a three-dimensional computer model that is based on building information modelling, so it’s a biometric model. Then the subsequent stage would be to analyse this data and define the objectives of the study that we’re doing. So, that in the first place creates a sort of screenshot of where we’re at in terms of the resilience index for a particular site.

Then we would go into the sort of the more dynamic elements whereby tweaking all the parameters and identifying shortfalls we create various scenarios until we reach a scenario that is a sort of best-fit scenario and that may be a best-fit from the resilience index scoring, so the highest possible resilience index scoring or it might actually fit other objectives such as political or social objectives. And this then creates the basis of a project brief which is where really Kassandra stops. Kassandra is not really there to create projects, it is not a project tool, it is there to support the project creation, but if the project carries on obviously then the output from the project can be fed back into the system in a continuous loop. So, if you’re looking at a whole city, you can have real-time data in terms of your city for all those parameters and it’s a way of actually managing your city much better.

So, we obviously chose the Kassandra name, it wasn’t a random choice. Those of you familiar with Greek Mythology know that Kassandra had the gift of foreseeing the future but nobody believed that that was her curse and it’s similar to when we’re talking about climate change, often we find ourselves in the same position. So, effectively Kassandra the tool allows you to see what’s there and foresee what the future might be, so making your decisions better.

We have now moved on quite a bit and we’ve been working on this pilot study for the city of Modica where we’re based. Modica is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s in a steep valley and it has had continuous habitation for something like 3000 years. It’s also at 36 degrees north of latitude which is the area of the Mediterranean, certainly the area in Western Europe that is most at risk from climate change.

This is an image, a satellite image of a medicane, so a Mediterranean hurricane that happened in late September this year and at that point when this image was taken, it was touch-and-go whether the medicane would turn left and go to Sicily or turn right and go to Greece. It was lucky for us but unlucky for the Greeks that it decided to turn right in that case but this is something that we’re seeing more and more of an extreme weather is becoming quite common. So, it’s not always sunny down here, quite the opposite.

Here we have an historic view from 1782 of Modica. Modica developed on the hilltop but then spread rather rapidly down into the valley where two rivers joined together. And this is the situation these days of the historic centre of Modica. Obviously it’s an area that had been heavily built up, starting from cave dwellings and then obviously built up over the ages and its designation is due to the late 17th century baroque architecture. As you can see, down in the valley the river has been replaced by a river of cars. In the last century the riverbed was covered up and it turned into the main transit access for the whole town. So, what we did in this pilot study, we created a model of 3 kilometre x 4 kilometre that included 13,000 buildings and each one of these buildings that you’ll see in the video that I’ll be showing soon is effectively an object in the virtual twin of Modica and so it has all the parameters that you saw in the list.

So, if we can start the video… So, obviously we’re then back in time when we looked at Modica, so this is Modica in the bronze age, then moving into the middle ages, and the 17th century, into the early 19th century and this is the situation as it is now. You can see from this image that the typography is quite complex deep in the valley. Then we looked at Kassandra and the current resilience index of the city which is an unsatisfying 48% and that allows us to see where the key areas of intervention should be. Identifying these we found what would be a best-fit scenario in terms of the objectives that we had. And in the case of this pilot study, we modelled what that meant in terms of what the city might be, so effectively I’ve moved on sort of a project stage in this. And for us, in this case, it was about water management. That was the main issue. So, with the floods that we get in Modica and the historic floods that there have been over the past centuries -that was the reason why the river was covered up in the first place- we have to manage the dry season and the wet season which is obviously getting warm or destructive. So, the introduction of rain gardens was one of the key elements to conserve water and also channelling water into the historic systems that most houses have here. That in turn allows us to have a sustainable and year-round water source that then can be used to increase the presence of vegetation. In fact in this case, it’s a process of rewilding the historic centre of Modica.

[He discuss turning off the video]

OK, so that’s the model that we were looking at in terms of the video, but as I said, each of these elements is a parametric element within the virtual space.

So, what does Kassandra do? The way we’ve envisaged it and we’re developing obviously the software as we speak, is that the Kassandra could be a tool for, in the first instance, for local authorities. You see on the screenshot where it’s highlighted the issues in these particular areas. In one respect Kassandra could work as a management tool for local authorities, showing for instance that there might be a problem in it or heat island effect in an area as described in this image and what to do with it. And in this case, you get a highlight of the scoring related to the Kassandra parameters that shows that there is for instance, in this case, lack of vegetation and that there is a very low resilience index for this particular area. So, acting on that by planting trees, by actually virtually planting trees because you haven’t done anything yet, you’re just sort of creating a scenario, you can actually see what the effect might be. And here you see that the resilience index has gone up to 63.4 and the temperature has gone down so now it’s gone back into the green zone. The vegetation, obviously the environment parameter has gone up but you’ll see I’ve sort of highlighted the cost parameter because of the increased maintenance cost.

It can be also a design tool, design tool aimed at obviously everybody in the design and in the build environment where you can also have a three-dimensional model of the city and you can test on your project what the effect would be in terms of resilience, for instance, if we take a building in the historic centre and we decide to increase its insulation properties.

So, in this case, we go from an increase in the resilience index but crucially we see here in the top right-hand corner what the effect in terms of the resilience index of your neighbourhood might be, but also the effect that your action might have on the entire city.

Now we think that this is a key element of Kassandra and I will talk about that in the next slide a little bit more, in the citizen engagement element of Kassandra. We imagine that with the tool there might be the possibility of having individual citizens who might want to look at creating scenarios for their own properties and looking at ways of increasing the climate resilience of their properties. And crucially even with this we see that there is a way of analysing parameter by parameter what the resilience score of your property is, creating scenarios, so how can you improve, what is the best way of improving your property, what the effect is again on your neighbourhood and what the effect is on your real city.

In this case we have cheekily suggested that there should be a rebate from maybe your council tax for an improvement over a certain limit of your resilience index because of the benefit it has on the whole of society. In this case, I mentioned the cumulative effect. Obviously this is something that we’ve seen quite a lot recently with the virus and what we call the “swarm effect”. So, obviously if you have… Positive behaviour tends to create positive behaviour around you and in this case, so visualising how your actions can influence others even in terms of improving the climate resilience of your property, obviously you can imagine that cumulatively this has positive effect on the entire city.

So, I’d like to finish just with this quote from Saint Bernard because we always seem to go back to this and really get inspiration from nature to solve our problems in many ways. Now in terms of where we’re at with Kassandra, obviously it started off as a pilot study in the historic environment and we have recently been working with the University of Portsmouth on a project in the Caribbean, the islands of Dominica and Grenada, to improve climate resilience of the buildings there and provide new guidelines, especially after Dominica was stuck by a hurricane three years ago. Another project we’ve been working on -something that we didn’t expect, completely different- we’re working on improving the climate resilience of a motorway in Italy. And finally, just recently we’ve handed in the construction documents for a project related to the pilot study in Modica where we looked at applying everything we’ve learnt at city level in a small portion of the historic centre of around 2000 square meters. So, we are discovering many different applications starting from the historic environment and looking also at the multidimensional and interrelated connections between the various aspects that Kassandra looks at. Thank you very much. That’s all from me.

Hannah: Thank you, Mark. Hopefully you’ll all agree that’s an absolutely fascinating project and I can watch those reconstructions and the modelling again and again. And each time I talk to you, Mark, there’s a new strand to it and something else that you’ve developed it to apply to so it was fantastic to hear about how it’s progressed. I’ve got a few questions coming in which I think it would be good to raise. Mark, there’s a question about how making physical changes to historic properties, does the modelling take into account the potential impacts on the significance or the heritage value of the place and its setting?

Mark: Yes indeed, that’s one of the main things. It’s the interrelation between the various parameters. Obviously therefore, as an example, you want to change the windows in a historic property, that will obviously perhaps improve the resilience score in environmental score, in terms of energy, but reduce them in terms of its heritage value and obviously it is about striking a balance between the two.

Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And a question from Freya there: “What are the limitations in terms of scaling up Kassandra to, for instance, catchment scale?” Are there limitations or do you think that it would be able to do that? You mentioned that you were applying it to whole islands so I wonder whether a catchment might be possible.

Mark: Well, that’s a very good question. Effectively, the way we’ve developed Kassandra was different from other tools that are out there at the moment, apart from the fact that we study more interrelated parameters. Because we’re working in the historic environment, we chose not to use GIS based information but use more traditional information. So, we are looking at perhaps a smaller area but in greater depth. Having said that, we have been surprised of the way Kassandra can be applied on the larger scale and the way we do this is by focusing the scale on… For instance, in the case of Dominica, we are looking at greater detail for the villages and the towns and sort of less detail for the areas that are outside the towns so the more sort of landscape areas in that respect. But as a tool it’s entirely scalable. In fact we’re starting to use Kassandra from building level all the way up to -as we said- island level.

Hannah: Excellent. Thank you. And perhaps there’s a similar question for Antony about the scale. I think it may have been Anna in the chat who raised the question about how the polygons relate to existing HER records which I think you answered but also where and how the Historic Watercourse Polygons could be held nationally or used at a wider level than perhaps a local historic environment record level. I don’t know whether you’ve got anything to add to that Antony?

Antony: So, in principle, no problem really in just building them up catchment by catchment or going down in scale to sub-catchments and so on. I think it really depends on what you want to look at and what your questions is. We’ve focused on catchments because that’s already quite a large scale and is much larger than people tend to think about heritage in the context of watercourses but obviously we’re building up catchment by catchment at the moment we can keep on sort of adding them in I guess. At the moment we’ve kept the structure the same in terms of recording so that we could do queries across catchments so that’s… One thing I didn’t really go into was how we do the actual recording and that we are keeping some kind of structured language in there so that we can query it either across the catchment but in theory we could query across multiple catchments. So, yeah, that’s not really been on the cards yet but certainly there’s no reason why you shouldn’t I would say.

Hannah: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it’s worth saying that the CLandage Project that you mentioned earlier with the work with University of Liverpool and others that I’m also involved with is something that’s looking at how we can turn this into a toolkit that is something that others can apply to their own catchments and datasets and certainly that idea of how we can build up these elements into a nationally comparable and usable dataset is something we can explore within that project. I had a question for both of you actually about where you’d like to apply these methods next. I think Mark, although you’re based in Sicily, you are familiar with the UK having worked over here. I don’t know, have you got a place that you would dearly love to test your tools? Mark, I don’t know if you want to answer that one first?

Mark: Yes. A historic landscape I think is what I’ve been wanting to do. Obviously, we’ve been working with the built environment, we started with the built environment and I’d like to see the tool used in an almost entirely natural environment to see how its application can influence decisions there.

Hannah: Excellent. Thank you. And Antony, what about you? Where would you like to see the Historic Watercourse Polygons applied?

Antony: Yeah, that’s funny, I was going the opposite direction and having started in some fairly rural areas, it would be nice to go into the Calder, which is a very, very busy valley, and have had a look at that actually, just to get a sense of it previously. And the complexity of historic interventions in relatively small areas, that would be really interesting for us to look at and see if we can find some approach in an urban and industrial context.

Hannah: Yeah. Great. Thank you. And perhaps a bit of a cruel question: “Do you think the two approaches could work together?

Antony: Yep. [INAUDIBLE]

Mark: From our point of view, what we’ve started to see is that we are slowly becoming with Kassandra a sort of lynchpin of lots of different approaches and tools. Because we’re multidimensional we can actually then have other systems plug in rather easily to our scoring mechanism and we’re seeing this certainly with trees and planting, for instance, there are some very useful tools out there that we can use. But, in terms of approaches I think they’re quite compatible with Antony’s.

Antony: Yeah, absolutely, I think it would be a really interesting conversation to have about is how you get those tools to work and into the hands of people who will then make decisions with them.

Hannah: Excellent. And this is where the limitations of our webinar at not being able to pick on folk in the audience and give them a microphone is rather frustrating because I would love to hear more from our listeners about what they think the potential could be in their areas and I’m sure there’s lots of people mulling over how they might make use of it.

So, do please, if you want to carry on conversations about this with us then please do get in touch because I think yeah, I certainly would love to see some of these approaches applied in different places around the country. Because I think, as you said, both of you captured so beautifully that relationship between the individual actions at quite a small scale and these really big global challenges.

Both of these approaches enable us to look at how those connections can be made and in a very positive way as well and the way in which the historic environment is really part of the solution and I particularly liked that example in Modica of making use of those old systems to capture water, to solve a problem with water and then to support the growth of plants that then reduce the heat issues. That’s a particularly nice story, the reuse of that and I think Antony, the points that you were making about what happens perhaps when we understand better some of the historic places and the character of those places and what they might be able to do for us with that cultural approach rather than thinking just about cultural flood management rather than flood management. We’ll have to test that with Defra at some point, so if I get them on I will ask them. Did either of you have questions for each other? Antony did you have any questions…

Antony: Not just at the moment, no, no. It certainly would be interesting to carry on that conversation.

Hannah: Mark, what about you?

Mark: I’d say the same. I think there’s a few technical things that are probably not for this webinar that I’d like to discuss with Antony.

Hannah: Excellent. Well, I think… I can’t see any more questions coming up in the chat although there’s quite a few excellent cases being made for the Calder Valley being a useful site for testing some of these and the Canal and River Trust interested in exploring modelling systems, and I think Freya making the point about Defra’s magic possibly being a place to put some of these polygons so... Oh, no! A question just in from Bill. “A pessimistic question”, he says, “With environment now being almost exclusively natural in terms of government policy, will culture get a look in?” I think that’s a bit of a cruel one to ask Mark given that you’re not involved in the UK environmental sector, but I don’t know whether Antony... What are your feelings from having… the work that you’ve been doing engaging with catchment partnerships and flood and coastal?

Antony: So, I think when you show what you mean practically and how it makes a difference on the ground or in your understanding of the place, how that might affect how you then approach flood risk issues then I think the penny drops quite quickly. But certainly getting that into the policy-sphere is tricky and that’s why I was being sort of a bit intentionally provocative in say “well, let’s change the language” and think about if you were to substitute cultural in place of nature, what might it look like and use that as a way to make the case I guess in political terms to some extent and then work away from that. But I think it’s vital. My feeling is that a lot of… I think there’s general recognition that a lot of restoration just doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t have the outcomes that people expect and I think that’s partly because they’re trying to restore using natural processes to restore systems which are not natural. And I think unless you build in an understanding of the cultural development of a piece of landscape, what you’re trying to achieve just won’t work and if you look at success rates of nature-based processes, there are problems there and I think some of those problems come down to that lack of cultural and historical perspective.

Mark: Actually, if I may add… I think because it’s actually an international, global issue really, I think at the basis of all of these approaches and policies by governments, there has to be in project by project knowledge and understanding of the context. I think that is what it comes down to really. Just understanding really what the site is about, understanding its history, understanding what the main drivers are and then achieving that balance between what are conflicting issues.

Hannah: Yep, I think those are both very good points. I was in a meeting the other day with a few people I’ve noticed who are listening in today, talking about national park authorities and some of the work that’s happening there and someone referred to the need for a toolkit for advocacy and I think that is definitely a big part of this, it’s, as you say, the examples.

When you show people those connections, why understanding the history of that place matters, it can be quite dramatic how their understanding of that can change. But at the moment I think it’s finding and building that toolkit to really make that case and also trying to be positive about what we can offer. I think we’ve said this before that the language that you use and the way in which you present the opportunities and what can be done rather than dwelling on the things that can’t be done can often open more doors than you can expect.

But I think also, we probably can’t give up. There’s too much at stake and I think for as long as we think that there is something that we can offer this situation, we probably should try and find ways to make this message heard.

Right, it is now four o’clock according to my time which means our time is up for today so it just remains for me to thank Antony and Mark. Thank you ever so much for coming to talk to us today. I think it would be really good to revisit both these projects in the future at some point to see how things have moved on. I know I’d like to hear more and I’m sure a few of those listening would. But thank you ever so much and thank you those of you in the audience for engaging through the chat so fantastically and for turning up. It’s been a really great session this winter and autumn. It’s been a lot of fun to organise and I’m really looking forward to starting again in the New Year with a new series of speakers and talks so please do let us know if you’ve got anything that you particularly want to hear about.

And do remember that these webinars are available on our webpage for listening after the event so, if you’re at a loose end over Christmas then you can go and check them out and have a listen at your leisure with a glass of something festive.