Climate Impacts on Tangible Coastal Cultural Heritage in the United States: Towards Sustainable and Adaptive Coastal Heritage Management

Abstract

Climate change is predicted to have severe impacts on coastal communities, including sea level rise, flooding, and coastal erosion, and is expected to reshape many coastlines. One further, and often overlooked, consequence of the climate crisis is the threat posed to cultural heritage sites in the coastal zone. The threat to coastal cultural heritage (CCH) will inevitably impact both tangible (physical and material) and intangible (socio-cultural) components of cultural, historical, and archaeological character along frontline coastal communities. This poses substantial sustainability challenges for stakeholders and decision-makers for the management of cultural heritage assets and for management practices to respond to increasing threats from climate change. This paper uses five illustrative examples based on maximum variation principles to evaluate different strategies (or ‘steering’ processes) for managing coastal heritage resources in the context of climate change. These include the traditional ‘preservationist’ perspective and trajectories based on discontinuity or transformation. We examine these issues with reference to five post-European heritage assets located along the East Coast of the USA. While a consideration of steering processes is important, we argue that it is necessary to also embrace the policies and strategies for adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change through which processes of managing CCH unfold. Adopting such a perspective can lead to more nuanced approaches for understanding how CCH can respond to the challenges of a changing climate.