Economic and Societal Impacts on Cultural Heritage Sites, Resulting from Natural Effects and Climate Change

Abstract

The demand for a new concept of heritage, in which monuments and landscapes are considered active factors in creating a sense of history, is esteemed not only from a scientific and academic perspective, but as well as part of a more sensitive and efficient strategy to link cultural heritage and tourism, by bringing an integrative perspective to the forefront. Implementing such strategies is strictly correlated with the ability to support decision-makers and to increase people’s awareness towards a more comprehensive approach to heritage preservation. In the present work, a robust socioeconomic impact model is presented. Moreover, this work attempts to create an initial link between the economic impacts and natural hazards induced by the changes in the climatic conditions that cultural heritage sites face. The model’s novel socioeconomic impact analysis is the direct and indirect revenues related to the tourism use of a site, on which local economies are strongly correlated. The analysis indicated that cultural heritage sites provide a range of both market and non-market benefits to society. These benefits provide opportunities for policy interventions for the conservation of the cultural heritage sites and their promotion, but also to their protection against the impacts of climate change and natural disasters.

Application of Risk-Based, Adaptive Pathways to Climate Adaptation Planning for Public Conservation Areas in NSW, Australia

“…There is an urgent need to identify and adopt strategies to limit further climate change to avoid permanent change to social-ecological systems [56]. However, in the absence of successful global attempts at mitigation, adaptation to the impacts of climate change remains the only approach to the conservation of biodiversity and heritage values in protected areas.…”

Adapting cultural heritage to climate change impacts in the Netherlands: barriers, interdependencies, and strategies for overcoming them

“…knowledge, performing arts, social practices, oral traditions and expressions) resources, inherited from the past and created in the course of time by the people and/or their interaction with the environment (UNESCO 2003;2017), which today deliver a wide diversity of benefits to our societies, environments, and economies. Cultural heritage plays an important role in economic development and growth through tourism and recreation industries, including urban and rural revitalisation (Alexandrakis et al 2019;Janssen et al 2017;Licciardi and Amirtahmasebi 2012). For instance, in the Netherlands, 23% of all nationally significant cultural heritage located in the province of North Holland generates about half billion euros of the country's two billion euro revenue in the cultural and recreation industry (Statistics Netherlands 2019).…”

Cost–Benefit Analysis in the Evaluation of Cultural Heritage Project Funding

“…Considering the way of evaluating a cultural heritage product, the direct net impact of the cultural heritage product relies on proper identification of the main spending groups, while the indirect net impacts come from the induced effects of the direct net impacts (Alexandrakis et al 2019).…”