Webinar on Thinking About Interrelationships Between the Climate Crisis and Heritage

Speakers: Hannah Fluck, Dr Hana Morel, Matt

Hannah: Thanks, Matt. Welcome everyone. This is the first of what I hope will be many Friday Climate Change and Heritage webinars and I want to give a huge thank you to Hana for being the brave volunteer to kick this off.

So, the plan is that we have these at 3 o’clock every Friday for as long as people want to hear about climate change and heritage and for as long as people want to talk to us about it. So, if you have any thoughts of people that you’d like to hear from, topics that you’d like covered or suggestions from either yourselves or to volunteer others, then please do let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

But, after this week, the following weeks we will be hearing a little bit more from the Climate Heritage Network about the work that the network’s been doing around climate change and heritage all around the world and I look forward to telling you a little bit more about that next week when Andrew Potts will be joining me.

But, to set the scene, Dr Hana Morel is a research associate at University College London for the Arts and Humanities Research Council Heritage Priority Area and she’s currently leading on a project “Opening New Pathways to Impact across Heritage Research, Policy and Practice”. Her focus is on the development of planning policy and heritage in cities and the consideration of heritage studies in climate action and other sustainable concerns and her work calls for the recognition of the arts and humanities as central for successful policy development and its implementation. And it seems like an idea place for us to start thinking about some of the issues and entanglements of heritage studies and the climate crisis. So, over to you, Hana. Thank you very much.

Hana: Thanks, Hannah. Well, hello everyone. It’s great to be here and it’s actually really nice to see all of the hellos and greeting, so thank you for that and also for joining. And also, thank you to Hannah Fluck for the invitation and for setting this up. I think it’s going to be a much needed hub of resources for climate heritage, so I’m very happy, albeit slightly nervous, to contribute to it. So today I’m going to talk about the role of heritage studies in addressing the interrelationships or entanglements of the climate crisis. But before I start, I just want to quickly introduce myself. So, as Hannah said, I’m Hana Morel and I am based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and my background is actually in sociology, urban planning, archaeology and heritage management and actually, 20 years or so, I was just thinking about this, I had done my BSc and MA dissertations on the social impacts of climate change and heritage as a critical resource for sustainable development. So, I’ve been really interested in this area for some time and I’m really looking forward to future conversations.

So, before we start, I believe there is a question that… So, just to get an idea, it’s what your interest is in this webinar and… Fantastic.

Matt: So, whilst we’re waiting for those votes to come in, if there’s something that we’ve missed out on that or “Other” basically, please feel free to put that in the chatroom as well. So that looks pretty good. OK. I’ll broadcast those so everyone can see them. There you go. Excellent. OK. Shall we move on?

Hana: Yep. So, I just wanted to quickly mention the work that I’ve been doing since 2017 under the AHRC Heritage Priority Area and more particularly with this sub-project that I lead on within it called “Opening New Pathways to Impact across Heritage Research, Policy and Practice” And just, in a nutshell, the work focuses on getting research into policy and equipping policy makers with better conceptual tools as well as trying to transform understanding of how research can be translated into practical solutions to make it relatable and relevant to policy makers. So, questions that I draw on are things like how can what we do or what we learn help inform and better equip us to respond to sustainability concerns, which of course includes climate variability and other related crises and challenges. And that’s actually something that’s quite close to my heart, this idea that democracy happens between elections, that research institutions can and do play a huge civic role as instruments of democratic principles and research can play a massive role in how we shape evidence-based policy and even shift the narrative of how we frame those stories and insights.

And before we kick off, I just wanted to flag up one of the biggest barriers that we face when we’re trying to work towards a common crisis or a problem, and that’s communication or language. And I wanted to bring this up because I think a lot of us do realise that not understanding language or meaning or even the connotation or legacy of a word can make us talk at crossed purposes. And I do think that the word “heritage” in itself is a case in point. So, for example, each time I try to get in touch with someone whose work I think is really relevant to a discussion or a project because the work focuses on things like communities and place making, inclusivity, social values, empowerment, diversity or any of these areas that are discussed or explored within heritage studies, I have to literally call them up and talk them through what it is I mean by heritage studies, and that no, it’s not just about polises and towers and Stonehenge or tourist spots because their first response is literally “Well, I don’t do heritage, so I’m not interested”. And I guess if we don’t understand what we mean from these simple words, it’s incredibly difficult to work towards any effective response or strategy.

And I really think a basic and current example of this can be seen even with the pandemic. So, how individuals are interpreting and creating their own risk assessment of their own vulnerabilities or life choices is really dictated by what they understand by the word “flu” or “flu-like symptoms” and how they understand their role in its spread. So, what each of us understand, as a basic starting point, is how we end up changing our own behaviours and responses.

So, on this slide, it just has some ideas of what heritage is and can be and I think once we start acknowledging the complexity of what it can mean and what each of us think it means, I think only then can we really start to see eye-to-eye on how we can each use our own understanding of heritage to respond to our own, again, angle of understanding of the climate crisis. And to be honest, even just saying that out loud now, it comes across as something very obvious, but for example, I attended a heritage and sustainability conference and the event was so heavily related to conservation or heritage at risk with hardly any discussion about the social or political implications or dimensions of heritage which to me is so essential. So, even though you might think others get what you’re focusing on, I think that shouldn’t be taken as a given. So, I’m going to try to talk a little bit more about that today as well.

And we see language play a role in the climate sphere as well and it’s interesting here, I think, to think about George Orwell’s politics and the English language where he suggests two qualities of language. Staleness of imagery and lack of precision, which he sees as used by political speech and writing to basically defend what he sees as the indefensible. So, he points out that such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up a mental picture of them. And I think that this is really relevant for the shift in language we’ve seen in recent years to describe the climate phenomena and variabilities and how basically we label the phenomena can be charged or not with notions of responsibility and accountability. And ultimately, language as a vehicle of communication creates the conditions under which information is acknowledged and acted upon. So, this is worth thinking about when we think about labels such as inadvertent climate bonification, climate change, global warming, the climate crisis versus climate action, but of course, even when we start to think strategically and use words like “adaptation”, “mitigation”, “resilience” and even “stewardship” and “custodianship” and so on.

And I put this slide up to really demonstrate this by looking at how climate change denial is about reframing climate change as part of nature’s cycle, or highlighting climate occurrences against language. So, an example would be the fact that it’s snowing outside and how this is seen as contradicting the word “warming” in global warming. And obviously these arguments suggest action as unwarranted by creating uncertainty and doubt. And this is something that we really need to engage with because these argument, whether they’re propagated by interest groups or not, show us the scale of the complexity to understand, to present, to explain and to grasp the vast scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis.

And this is where we get to the interrelationships or entanglements of the climate crisis mentioned in my title. So, “wicked problems” or “social messes” are basically problems that are so complex that they become close to impossible to solve. It is a problem that is difficult to pinpoint and to recognise. They’re contradictory in that one solution can uncover or exacerbate another problematic aspect of it that we might or might not know about and that it’s constantly in flux and changing in its manifestation.

So, what we’re talking about here is entanglements and path dependencies which was coined by Rittel and Weber in 1973 as a “wicked problem” but has since evolved as a concept to what’s known “social messes”. It relies on illusive political judgement for resolution and is a problem that never exists in compete isolation but rather, and I’m quoting Russell Ackoff in his 1979 publication, “it exists in a dynamic, changing world which makes it resistant to analysis and more importantly to resolution”. And I just wanted to go through some of these points on the slide because I think they’re important. So, we have social messes as something in which there are different points of views about it as a problem, there is contradictory solutions, that most problems are connected to other problems and other issues, and there is ideological, political, economic, cultural constraints associated with the concern, that consequences are difficult to imagine, there’s a resistance to change, and of course the last line that problem solvers are often out of contact with the problems themselves.

And basically, this complexity really does translate into behaviours. So, in 2007, researchers Nisbet and Myers reported that the sense of not fully grasping the extent of the climate crisis makes people lack the confidence to advocate for change. Researchers Sterman and Sweeney, also in 2007, suggested from their work that 60% of participants surveyed -in the US this was- chose to wait until we’re really sure about climate change before doing anything drastic policy-wise. So this makes it difficult without that public support to get consensus on practical measures in place.

Moving 10 years down the line, a recent Ipsos poll carried out among more than 20,000 adults across 29 countries this April found that 77% of those surveyed understand human activities do contribute to climate change. So, that’s great, and 9% disagreed. But, oddly enough, that compared with their 2014 poll shows this percentage has actually seen a decline in numbers which you can see on the slide. But the report did also find that a majority of individuals are willing to make changes in their own behaviour to limit their personal contribution to climate change, which is great, but this really only applied to changes that were considered easy and convenient to achieve, rather than bigger, more far reaching changes like flying or changing their diet.

And actually, in the YouGov 2019 study of 30,000 people across 28 countries, there is also… In that one there is a notable difference between east and west attitudes towards climate change. And I thought this was quite interesting, so for example, one of the questions indicate that those in US or European countries don’t actually think climate issues will disrupt their lives in any large way as opposed to those in eastern or Middle Eastern countries who think that it will. And I just… I pulled out Great Britain, but only 17% of people in Great Britain think that climate change will have a great deal of impact which I find surprising considering floods and coastal erosions are quite regular here. So, hopefully that gives a brief view of some of the complexities of both heritage and climate.

So, what next then?

So, for me, the main question is really how we think of the world today, the modern world and how we think of our institutions, our values, our practices now that we can see and we know that human activities in fact are decisive in affecting our world’s stability. But we’ve had over 60 years of talking about the impact of the environment, of our impact on the environment in the public eye and this started with physicist Edward Teller in 1959 who addressed 300 government officials, economists, historians, scientists, industry execs at the Energy and Man symposium, predicting carbon dioxide’s strange property in the atmosphere would cause a rise in temperature. And at the time he was ostracised by the scientific community. But really, of course we can go back even a lot further than this, even to the late 1700s you had Alexander von Humboldt who acknowledged the interconnectedness between humans and ecosystems along with…Of course, that’s been acknowledged for some time, but he even realised how agricultural practices impact soil quality. So, this really isn’t new.

So, we really need to think about agenda setting and other systems in place that promote or demote interest for change and to me, on reflection, the underlying concepts aligned with any action are the sense of agency, the complexity of accountability, complicity, and hypocrisy involved, as well as a need for better communication and education. And all of these things I think are entangled into impacting public saliency of the issue.

And the problem is we know that sustainable thinking and other pro-environmental behaviours are actually very much dependent on human attitude, so by that logic, we really need to poke more at the gap between our values and our knowledge versus our actions to basically have a better understanding of the value-action and knowledge gaps that exist.

So, what I mean by that is understanding the difference between what people say, so their attitudes or personal or cultural values, versus what they actually do and that’s really core, it’s a core strategy behind environmental policy progression.

And if we scale up to an institutional level, we can start to ask what our understanding or our grasp is of the climate crisis within the Anthropocene and how does this relate to the capacity of our systems in place, so really to explore the capacity and limitations of our institutions as they are. And I really think heritage studies, from its focus to its methodologies, to its resources and services can play a big role here. And basically, the only actual way that we can respond to this is social change, and by that I mean rethinking aspects such as culture, governance, socioeconomic structures, technological advances and so on, which are at the heart of implementation of any adaptation strategy.

OK, so I know I just threw out that word, the “Anthropocene”, so I just wanted to touch on that briefly. Research and scholarship on the concept and idea of the Anthropocene can really be seen across the academic spectrum but it’s something you rarely ever hear or see outside of academia or research and… But I think it’s important to think about its meaning because it emphasises the extraordinary scale and scope of what we see as human influence and activity on the Earth. And going back to Orwell’s idea of language and imagery, the word “Anthropocene” helps to understand that when we think of human impact and changes in climate, we’re not just talking about extreme weather or melting icecaps or rising sea levels, we’re talking about a profound and irreversible state shift in the Earth’s system for an extended period of geologic time and that these climatic changes have defined that epoch and manifested itself as mass extinction of species, of biodiversity decline, as a huge transformation of land through our land use practices, of depleted atmosphere, high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in our soils through agricultural practices, microplastics in our oceans and organisms and actually disease outbreaks such as COVID through pasture insect migration or pushing of wildlife to the boundaries and putting them under severe environmental pressures.

OK, so if we think about heritage studies and climate variability, we’re also essentially thinking about the relationship or the divide between nature and culture.

And I’m not going to delve into this too much and I’ve put up this slide somewhat provocatively, but essentially what I wanted to say by this is it’s worth acknowledging the centuries of scholarship and of course, cultures that recognise the interconnectedness between nature and culture. But you know, this slide is up and it’s obviously very crude but it’s more to have a brainstorm about how some arguments have been framed around nature and culture for so long and actually these separations really extend to other socio-political framings which put nature in opposition to culture. And I raise this because of its relevance in thinking about how existing policies and decision-making institutions fall short in approaches which allow us to address culture and nature as an integrated system and thus integrated policy. And of course, there’s decades of scholarship based on recognising the arbitrary divisions between nature and culture or how people think, but this divide still exists, and you only have to look at the current Environmental Bill making its way through the UK parliament to see this.

And of course, understanding nature and culture as integrated doesn’t just need to be a study in and of itself, but it can be an approach or a language, or a means used to address issues within other wider disciplines or forms of management or frameworks such as in the study of land use and the modification of the natural environment or health and medicine, poverty and opportunity, agriculture and food production or social rights and natural or cultural capital and so on. Our philosophy of nature and culture, or nature and nurture is practically at the core of everything we do. And I think that’s something that Heritage Research helps recognise but is also central to how we relate to changes that we see in our ecosystem as well as our approach to things like accountability and agency and responsibility which feeds into mitigation and adaptation strategies.

And this relates to some work I did in 2017 which identified seven themes or categories which were used as leverage points for heritage interventions. I’m just going to highlight a few of the findings from the report which were used as a sort of a starting point to inform the working group led by Marcy Rockman that fed into the Climate Heritage Network.

So, I’ll try to be as clear and as transparent as I can here, but the brief of the research was to explore where we can find references to heritage in a selection of IPCC publications, basically to highlight how heritage is portrayed and what inferences are made in relation to the past, past societies and practices. So, what I did was go through all of the IPCC documents on the slide here and explore the extent to which heritage in some capacity had been incorporated into them. And I should say that this work was done quickly, so there’s scope for error in it, but it was done to get a rough idea of heritage associations in existing IPCC documents.

So, I used a series of key words, which you can see in the report, that were associated with heritage and searched through the documents and with each word I looked at the context it was being used in and tried to capture the overall angle of the section. And ultimately of course, this research is completely subjective but I read the extracts and created relevant themes based on what I thought they expressed. If an extract didn’t fit into an existing theme, I created a new theme for it and came up with these seven themes. So, I’ll just quickly go through the themes and point out how I define them which is also in the document.

So, the Limitations, Barriers and Cultural Differences theme is used to categorise extracts which refer to culture, heritage, the past or a society or community values as a barrier of mitigating climate change during the implementation stage of a policy or decision-making activity. So, this can include socioeconomic or cultural aspects such as poverty and inequality. So, for example, an extract that falls into this category would include: “a limited ability to cope and adapt due to marginalisation, high poverty, and cultured imposed gender roles”. So, basically, it’s where social stressors, which include poverty, inequality and cultural factors in the documents, are seen to impinge on resilience.

This one is about seeing natural and cultural heritage as potential assets to tackling climate change. And an example of this section is that “strategies supporting cultural preservation and subsistence livelihood needs among Indigenous peoples would enhance adaptation, as would integrating traditional culture with other forms of knowledge, technologies, education and economic development”.

Moving on, Risks collates various extracts which directly suggest heritage and/or indigenous livelihoods are at risk because of climate changes, so I think that’s quite basic. Sorry, my computer phone was just ringing. So, an extract to that would be as straightforward as: “enhanced risk of loss of livelihoods and culture of increasing numbers of indigenous people…” as an example.

This one highlights references which suggest that indigenous traditional or local practices are useful in tackling the climate crisis and can provide an alternative to resilience. So, an example extract here would be that “bio-cultural heritage can be a resource used for mitigation and sustainability which can eventually become a national policy”.

Adaptation, Assessments and Responses has extracts which discuss adaptation methods, issues with assessing the impact of climate change on areas of heritage, as well as issues concerning land use and rights of indigenous communities. So here, for example, is how adaptation and responses need to integrate a wide range of knowledge from existing practices because adaptation, planning and implementation are contingent with societal values, objectives and risk perceptions.
The Prehistoric and Past Society references collates any information that directly suggests past societies have had to deal with climate change and possible outcomes that we deduct from that data. So, an example is the exploration into past climate changes through various case studies, looking at cultures that underwent drastic transformation due to climate such as “collapse”.

And lastly, Gaps to Understanding, which pulls together some of the extracts that suggest that there are gaps of particular areas and what areas we need to gather more scientific data on. And so this is interesting because a quick example is that the section really relates to uncertainty about future vulnerability but also a clear recognition that we need more research on culture. So, you can see that it says “culture is of crucial importance for adaptive capacity”.

So, first the IPCC sees adaptation challenges as closely linked to cultural norms and societal values, so essentially the documents recognise that our value-based judgement of what is a risk or not and our understanding of limits to adaptation are largely informed and different across actors and cultures but they are also informed by historical experiences. So basically, acceptance of the science behind controversial risks or known risks is strongly influenced by cultural values and beliefs. Second is that vulnerability is the product of intersecting social processes such as discriminations and various factors that result in inequalities. So, it suggests that it is these groups of underprivileged peoples that find it hardest to have the resources that allow adaptation and mitigation. The third point is about transformation. So, transformation requires a particular understanding of risks, adaptive management, learning, innovation and leadership and that is the way that we can get to climate-resilient development pathways. There’s also a word of caution that transformational change can also lead to negative consequences and contribute to social inequities and I think that’s something that we really have to pay attention to which is why I think a lot of research is talking about managed transformational change. And the last point is that any progress to tackle the climate crisis can be blocked by political and institutional inefficiencies, lack of prioritisation of climate change and the dominance of other discourses which can include things like short-term disaster focused views.

So, what are some of the next steps to think about? I’ve picked up on some areas but of course, the list is endless. But I think we need to pick up on value. We know that science can quantify and give the technical sense, the probability, the magnitude or whatever model or potential consequence you want to throw at someone but ultimately, the values we have influence the judgements we make about the relative importance of for example, global economic growth versus assuring the wellbeing of the most vulnerable among us or the environment. I think that’s a very common thing that we hear today during the pandemic. But also, our judgements depend on the extent to which we feel directly exposed to climate variability, so that entanglement is again, something to think about.

I also think that legislative and policy frameworks for adaptation remain fragmented and the report raises that adaptation policy approaches rarely take into account realities in the political and institutional spheres and national policies are often at odds with autonomous, local or heritage-based adaptation strategies which again, can act as a barrier to adaptation, especially when cultural, traditional and context-specific factors are ignored.

The third is there is a genuine lack of local participation in policy formulation and the neglect of social and cultural context which could facilitate appropriate national policies and frameworks that would support local level adaptation. So that’s really something that I think heritage work can feed into as well. And I think that there is a huge scope for understanding the inequalities and inequities magnified by the climate crisis and this includes recognising that some cultural practices or traditional ways of life are in themselves part of these inequalities and inequities. And this goes to my last point that there are so many aspects of this climate madness that heritage studies can contribute to but in those studies we need to be willing to accept that sometimes heritage is not necessarily the answer but can also be a part of the limitations. So, we need to look to the opportunities that we can contribute towards in a managed transformation while addressing our own limitations in relation to future change.

And when I say that what I mean is certainly not to destructively criticise Heritage Research or its institutions, but I’m going to paraphrase John Dryzek and Pickering here who have some really interesting work on looking at what they call “Holocene” and “Anthropocene” institutions. Basically they look at thinking in terms of systems to understand the Anthropocene and its implications for human institutions and practices. So, really it’s about pulling together perspectives of the social, environmental, political and cultural together into an integrated systems approach of humans and environmental systems. So, if we were to think about climate risk and resilience work or adaptation and climate change strategy, we need to engage and explore case studies that enable us to rethink patterns, causes, mechanisms and other variables and complex interactions.

I think that sort of reflexivity is what we as individuals and institutions need so that we can be dynamic in our responsiveness to changing conditions in both society and the Earth system and that can be through a commitment, for example, to periodically review institutional values or remits or arrangements among other things and I certainly do think that that is starting to happen. So I’m going to leave it there and move straight to a question and then I think after I’ve put the resources on a slide for everyone…

So, just to… Matt, are you going to read that out?

Matt: I am going to read it out. “Mitigation is aimed at tackling the causes and minimising the possible impacts of climate change whereas adaptation looks at how to reduce the negative effects it has and how to take advantage of any opportunities that arise. Which of these two are you currently engaged with?” OK. That’s really interesting. I’m actually going to open up the results so you can all see, so there you go. 47% of you are engaged with both. That’s really good. Fantastic. Still one or two votes still coming in. OK, I think that’s good. Right, let’s make that disappear. We have another question too, don’t we?

Hana: Yes.

Matt: Let’s just move that on, there we go. Question 3, here we go. So this is a multiple answer so you can tick as many boxes as you like which is an open invitation for all you to tick all the boxes I know but try not to. Try to be a little bit more… OK. That’s great. Let’s reveal those answers, there you go. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Still a few more votes coming in. OK. There you go, let’s leave it there. Great. OK. Moving on…

Hana: These are some of the resources that I mentioned in the presentation and thanks for listening. So… I’m done.

Matt: Hana, thank you so much. Absolutely blistering presentation there. There’s just so much information isn’t there. And one thing that you will all be, I’m sure, very glad off… I’m just going to copy a link in here so if you’d like a copy of Hana’s with all those resource links, there you go, that’s where you find them. Thank you so much. What we’re going to do also is… I’ll just move this up. I’m just going to bring a Q&A poll in there for you. So, this is your opportunity to ask any questions of both the Hannahs. Indeed, I’ve got the other Hannah, Hannah Fluck from Historic England. She’s pretending to be one of the attendees so I need to bring her back up to Presenter, there you go. OK, Hannah is now Presenter so Hannah, if you just go to the top of your screen and click on that little microphone icon, that’ll reactivate your microphone. So please, if you have any questions for Hannah or Hana -I know that’s a little bit confusing isn’t it- please type it either in the chatroom or indeed into the Q&A window there. You’ll see there’s a little textbox at the bottom of that Q&A window and we will address each question as it comes in.

We have a few questions that have come in already in the chatroom. The first one happened right at the beginning of the session actually and it’s: “How we can retain our historic town halls but achieve our zero-carbon targets?”. Stephanie who asked the question, if you’d like to add anything to that then please feel free in the chatroom there. But… maybe Hannah Fluck, are you able to comment on that?

Hannah: Yeah, Matt, I think there are a few questions in there about how… I think there was a question as well from Mark about how heritage is seen… I think your question Mark was about how heritage is seen as a barrier to introducing some of the sustainable measures that we need to mitigate climate change and I think these are really pertinent points that we’re thinking quite hard about at the moment. I think actually there’s a difference between the perception that heritage is a barrier to some of these things and then perhaps the reality when you actually look at how much we can do with our existing built heritage and with our knowledge of how those buildings work and I know there’s an awful lot of resources which I will add to the webpage. And this is something we’re going to explore in the future about how we can work with those buildings to improve their energy efficiency but keep the historic elements and more importantly work with those buildings and the materials so that they are still usable and keep serving us into the future. I think the point about… I think Mark your point was about things like windfarms and solar farms and things like that. We actually have a piece of work that we’re going to be undertaking looking at how planning decisions are… how heritage has been used or how heritage is affected by sustainable power generation planning applications to look at the reality as to how many instances that is a reason for things being objected to or refused and so that we can then look at what some of those issues might be or whether in fact we’re actually… the perception is that they’re a problem and they might not be. So, we’re trying to gather information on that and then look at how we can respond. But I’m going to put up a link to Historic England’s statement on climate change and sustainability which might also help reflect some of those issues that are coming up around that kind of planning sphere.

Hana: I also… No, go on.

Hannah: I was just going to go back to the language question because I think that also… I think that some of the things that we often see reflected… [INAUDIBLE]

[they discuss sound quality issues]

Hannah: ...Yeah, just going back to the language question and about how we can better use language to help engage and have some of these often quite difficult conversations about when things are barriers and how we can find our way through that and whether you’ve got any examples or thoughts about how we can do that better.

Hana: Yeah, you know, at one point I was ready to write a kind of little guide of different understandings of, for example, heritage and I don’t have much of a suggestion other than whether it’s just a glossary or literally just speaking to people through it. I haven’t quite figured it out because it is something that even when you speak to someone and you explain what particular words mean, they still sort of take it and run with it and then fit it into their own world, their own kind of cultural scape and their… whether it’s what they’re focused on in their lives or their work and things like that. So, I think it’s just… One of the things I generally do is -whether it’s in an email or a report- I just try to define it or make it very clear at the beginning even if it just sounds kind of quite silly to do but… And a lot of reports I suppose do have those definitions. Some of them get pulled out. I know for example in the National Planning Policy Framework that we have here in the UK, there was a definition when it was revised to have what sustainable is and then that’s recently got pulled out, but I find that those initial definitions are quite useful so that we’re all… at least we can go away and think or google it. So yeah, it’s just a very basic step in the first instance, I think.

Matt: Thank you. So Catherine asks: “How positive are that policy makers in powerful positions are engaged enough to make a difference?”

Hana: I… So some of the work that I’m doing now, as I mentioned, is really about engaging with policy makers and I think it’s… again, it’s going back to language, so what do mean by policy? Who are the policy makers? Are they the people who are elected? Are they influencers or are they people who can shape their own organisations which in turn are influential? And at first, I have to admit I had a very kind of misguided view of policy makers but I think in the work that I’ve done since January onwards and a little bit before that, it’s actually… If you manage to find them or somehow, you know, find their email or Twitter account or whatever it is, I found people to be really receptive. So, I was surprised at how many people in different kind of tiers of at least government in England that I’ve managed to speak to, to invite to talk, to engage or to be responsive to some of the research that I’ve been doing. So, I’m quite… I’m positive about it and I think also now, particularly with climate action, it’s very high on the agenda and I think that even though the processes can be difficult to go through, at the end of the day everyone really knows that, whether it’s for their own kind of career or whether it’s actually for a genuine want to have people at the centre of decision-making, there is a receptiveness.

Matt: OK. So Joanna asks: “How can we convey urgency when some loss of heritage is slow onset?”

Hana: Yeah, I think that’s… Interestingly there is the parallel with the climate crisis as well. It’s how do you… I guess back in… When I was… When the Kyoto Protocol was coming out and the COP was in The Hague I remember going to sort of protest outside and it was this same thing about how do you kind of persuade people of this sense of urgency when you’ve got this sort of slow apocalypse happening and how can you actually pinpoint the things that are going on, on what you say it is. So, I would… I don’t know quite how to do that. I think that there’s… What comes to mind is, and Hannah would know this, about the lighthouse in Orfordness that was part of the Heritage Futures project where it just… this lighthouse just slowly was creeping towards its inevitable kind of loss into the sea from coastal erosion. And I think basically one of the ways you could do this is just by example through example. There is lots of, for example, heritage at risk sites that are right now being flooded or weathered or whatever it is, ruined by different issues that surround climate. And I think the best example is just an example which is why we need more case studies and to kind of bring those altogether, I guess, it would be good to have a space where case studies from around the world are put into one central space or hub.

Hannah: Yeah. I think one of the issues with that sense of urgency is also, I think someone else picks up on it, the… I think maybe it’s Anna with the “wicked problem” and that sense of being overwhelmed. And I think none of us need any more problems and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I quite often feel like…You know, if you can’t do anything you often feel like just giving up and it’s very hard to maintain that sense that you can do something. So I think what I’ve seen over the past few years I’ve been working with cultural heritage and climate change is that it really does offer some genuine hope and some opportunities for positive action and often in some really simple ways. So, a lot of the research that I know my colleagues at Historic England have been undertaking is about how important maintenance is, just looking after, well actually all of our belongings, but particularly our buildings to keep them in good repair is one of the most sustainable things and one of the best contributions we can make. And it’s almost too simple but I think there’s a lot of traditional practice as well which is often very simple that we need to think about and I know a lot of the work of the Climate Heritage Network has really been looking at some of these positive actions and presenting in a very positive way. And interestingly, this morning, Harriet Hoffler -I think she’s on the call somewhere from DCMS- sent to me a report that’s going to the UN General Assembly from the cultural rights records which I will put in the chat bar, on cultural rights and climate change and one of things that picks up is very strongly that sense of not just the way in which our cultural rights are affected by climate change but some of the positive ways in which it can help. I think it’s a great report to read. I recommend you take a look at it.

Hana: Yeah. I actually… after I saw that from you Hannah, I quickly looked at it as well and it is really exciting, I think. It talks about… It has a bunch of recommendations as well about what has been so regularly ignored but taking cultural rights and culture into consideration when responding to aspects of climate action. And I think one of the recommendations is like developing effective strategies for communicating to the public, which again I think is really important in relation to kind of culture, cultural heritage, cultural rights and their importance in climate action.

Matt: OK. We’ve got roughly about five minutes left and we’ve got a few more questions, so shall we see if we can zip through them as efficiently as we can. Anthony asks: “The nature/culture dualism is deeply embedded in conservation science and in policy. How do we best mitigate or adapt to this?”

Hannah: Yeah. I’m always happy to jump in with that one. I think Anthony knows it’s one of my favourite topics. He’s tried to point out how -as Hana did in this talk- how deeply connected those things are and I think again, it goes back to that language… even the language, the checking-in that we’re talking about the same things when we’re talking to colleagues from different, or even from the same background. So, reminding people that our environment is the combination of natural processes in human activity, and I think particularly in UK policy we have to keep restating that because it’s very easy to slip into quite a fragmented, siloed approach to these things and then that means that you don’t always find these more… these messier solutions to these “wicked problems”. So there are a number of things that are trying to look at breaking that down, looking at how… There’s a brilliant project I think I’ve talked about before, a webinar on here funded by the Leverhulme looking at the Holocene, biodiversity and human activity which is, yeah, using archaeological records and environmental records to reconstruct that… I’ll see if I can put a link in there. But making that point that it’s an extremely long-term, complex relationship. So, I think we just have to keep reminding people. Indigenous peoples around the world think that this isn’t even a conversation that you have because it’s just so obvious the close connection between people and nature that they’re not even divided. And I think again, looking for those peoples and ways of thinking and being that haven’t gone to such trouble to try and separate those things is also something that is incredibly valuable.

Hana: I think it’s… Just to kind of take an example here, DCMS and Defra, it’s nice to see now you can kind of see them speaking to each other which… about whether it’s heritage, there’s a heritage council which is supposed to be cross-departmental. But I think it’s probably one of these issues where you have people inside that are recognising that they need talk to other departments and that this is happening more, but it’s also the structures embedded of DCMS and Defra for example. So at the same time, they have their own responsibilities and roles and focus like, you know, Defra with land use where that’s so fundamental and heritage has so many implications to land use. So you can kind of… You can just see people working across boundaries as well which is promising. I don’t know if Historic England speaks to Natural England that much. That would be something for you guys…

Hannah: Yeah, we do. In fact, I can see Natural England colleagues on there at the moment who we are working with quite closely on our [INAUDIBLE]…

Matt: OK. Let’s move on.

Anna says: “Knowing climate change is a ‘wicked problem’ is helpful because it does feel overwhelming, so understanding what small steps we can take is key”. No question there, just a helpful comment, and I totally agree. It’s just knowing what steps to take, isn’t it?

And Dan asks: “In light of proposed changes to the planning system in England which is attempting to promote policy related to climate change and reducing carbon, what opportunities does the Historic Environment in developer-led archaeology have in feeding into this agenda? Are there opportunities for us to contribute on a sector-wide scale?”

Hana: I think that there are. I think that there… For example… I mean this is such a huge question, but I guess Hannah would know about things like retrofit and reuse and maintenance and so on of traditional builds and the built environment. I think that as a sector, as archaeologists, and this kind of goes back to I guess Anna Badcock’s comment about how different sectors can do various different things and you know… and individuals can take very different steps to kind of curb their own, let’s say, carbon budget or footprint. And I think it would be interesting to explore and I guess this [INAUDIBLE] working group is doing this or will be. But the construction industry, if I understand, is responsible for 33% of GHGs, so seeing that archaeology is development-led, maybe there is just more of a conversation to have between what the built environment, traditional buildings or particular kind of local or sustainable materials can do during construction. So maybe that’s one of the opportunities.

Matt: Good. OK. I think we’re done. One last question, Hana. Is that you hiding behind the tree?

Hana: That’s my nephew. I try to use him in most of my pictures.

Matt: Excellent. Excellent.

Hana: It’s my little nephew, [INAUDIBLE]

Matt: Wonderful. Hana, thank you so much for an absolutely superb presentation and I do so hope we can persuade you to come back and present again. Thank you also to all of our attendees from all over the globe who have taken to time to join us today. I hope you’ve found today’s webinar as fascinating and informative as I have and please do feel free to copy the links that we’ve posted in the chatroom for you. There’s a couple more I can put in there as well. Here we go, here’s one. This is the link to the Historic England website page for all our webinars, so please feel free to keep an eye on that webpage for all the future webinar series, certainly webinar series on climate change, that’ll be listed there. And also you’ll find the links to recordings of previous webinars as well. Here’s another link…

Hannah: Matt, can I just flag up that the forthcoming lists… So, I think I mentioned next week we’ve got the start of the Climate Change and Culture series with the Climate Heritage Network.

So next week we’ve got “Mobilising Arts, Culture and Heritage: An Introduction to the Climate Heritage Network Madrid-to-Glasgow Climate Action Plan” and I’m going to be talking to Andrew Potts about that from the Climate Heritage Network.

The following week we’ve got a fantastic line-up looking at supporting climate action by local communities and indigenous peoples. I think we go truly global from that. We have the Americas, the Far East and Europe represented in that panel.

Then we have “Communicating the Role of Cultural Heritage in Climate Action” followed by “Mainstreaming Culture and Heritage into Climate Planning”.

On Friday the 13th, which will be a lucky day, “Making the Case for Building Reuse through Better Metrics for Avoided, Operational and Embodied Carbon”. I think that will answer a lot of questions about what we can do in very practical terms.

Then we have “Valuing Traditional Knowledge in Climate Action” and then finally “Using Culture to Promote Climate Resilient Sustainable Development” on Friday 27th November. So, the details of those will be coming up on our webpage. I think on Monday you said that will be available…

Matt: Absolutely, yes. So, a veritable smorgasbord of climate change topics to be covered there and I hope and trust that we will see you all attending those webinars moving forward.