Assessing Impacts of Climate Change on Cultural and Natural Heritage

Dear Colleagues,

Climate change has been recognised as the greatest threat to the places, people and processes that are considered of high value by the global community. Some threats are already apparent, with impacts on the value of natural and cultural heritage from heatwaves, droughts, intense rainfall and rising sea levels. Future impacts can be anticipated through assessments of climate vulnerability, which can also help managers and other stakeholders to understand the internal capacities of systems to adapt, as well as evaluating adaptation strategies to support their systems through mitigating potential impacts. Communities associated with areas of significance can also be affected by declines in the value of heritage.

This Special Issue aims to collect studies on assessments of the climate vulnerability of natural and cultural heritage. Whilst this may include descriptions of observed impacts, the focus is on looking to the future through the consideration of climate change threats, adaptive capacities within the system, and management strategies to reduce climate vulnerability. Climate-related threats may also interact, and potentially exacerbate, other sources of vulnerability to heritage (e.g., direct anthropogenic impacts). Assessments of how communities may be affected by declines in the value of heritage—and be able to respond in the face of these—are important to understand how to manage threats.

The topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Climate change threats and impacts on the value of both cultural and natural heritage, and the communities associated with this value;
• Reports of assessments of vulnerability to climate change for systems (places, people and processes);
• Conservation practices undertaken in response to observed or anticipated impact, and measures of their effectiveness;
• Perspectives on climate vulnerability from a variety of author groups, including Indigenous voices.

Original research, review articles, case studies, and research papers focusing on these topics and other related investigations are accepted.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Scott F. Heron on behalf of the guest editors

Dr. Scott F. Heron
Dr. Jon C. Day
Dr. William P. Megarry
Dr. Rebecca Jones
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Heritage is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.