Cultural Heritage: Climate Change

Paul Holmes
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what research her Department has conducted into the impact of climate change on the United Kingdom's heritage sites and historic environment.

Mr. Lammy
My Department financed an UNESCO climate change expert meeting in March 2006, which produced the Strategy to Assist State Parties to Implement Appropriate Management Response, adopted at the 30th World Heritage Committee in 2006. DCMS is also looking to initiate a project, in consultation with its NDPBs, which will record and summarise their current activities to mitigate and support adaptation to climate change and produce an estimate of the Department's and the NDPBs’ carbon footprint.

In 2002 English Heritage commissioned the Centre for Sustainable Heritage (CSH) to carry out a scoping study on climate change and the historic environment, published in 2005; and contributed to CSH’s stakeholders’ dissemination and scientific research report, “Engineering Historic Futures”, published in 2007. English Heritage is currently running a series of research projects addressing separate aspects of the climate change agenda, including the assessment of the effect of coastal erosion on historic settlements.