Climate-resilient, Climate-Friendly World Heritage Cities
2014
While the negative impacts of climate change on urban areas are well known and widely discussed, its implicit impacts on historic downtowns have not been studied as extensively. In recent years, cultural-heritage conservation and valorization have increasingly become drivers of local economic development. This paper is an effort to merge these two critical agendas. It investigates the impacts of climate change on 237 World Heritage Cities (WHC) and provides an overview of the geographic distribution of these cities around the globe. It discusses the importance of historic downtowns and provides various options available to the governments of these cities to address risk mitigation and adaptation to climate change. Further, it provides examples of WHC that have already taken action to address their vulnerabilities.