**About the Editors**

**Chiara Bertolin** is Associate Professor in "Non-destructive techniques and structural health monitoring" at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. She has a master's degree and PhD in Astronomy from Padua University in Italy.

Throughout her academic career, she has developed interdisciplinary competencies, research and teaching skills on historic climatology, microclimate studies for cultural heritage preservation, analysis of climate change impacts on the built environment and the assessment of mechanical decay caused by the effects of climate variation on wood. She was awarded both the Outstanding Academic Fellow (2020-2023) and the Onsager Fellow position (2016-2021) in the Research Excellence Program at NTNU.

She is the Principal Investigator and coordinator of the he FRIPRO FRINATEK Young Research Talent International Research Project: SyMBoL—Sustainable Management of Heritage Buildings in a Long-term Perspective (2018-2021), which also involves the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), the Polish Academy of Science (PAS) and the Getty Conservation Institute. Bertolin is the Leader for Norway of the ANATOLIA Project (2020–2024) for the European Space Agency (ESA) in the framework of atmospheric monitoring to assess the variability of optical links through the atmosphere. In 2020, in Nature, she published within a major international consortium of researchers, the reconstruction of the flooding characteristics in Europe over the last 500 years (Gunter Bloschl et al., 2020, Current Flood-rich period exceptional compared to past 500 years in Europe. Nature 583:560-566). In 2019, she was invited to fill the role of Contributing Author in the IPCC Working Group I Sixth Assessment Report, which is expected in 2021. Since 2011, she has been a member of the Scientific Committee of the National Standardization Body "Environment" of the Cultural Heritage Commission and of the European Committee for Standardisation CEN/TC 346—WG7 "Specifying and measuring Indoor/Outdoor Climate and Cultural Deposits". She was a Scientific Advisor for UNESCO in the Private Committees Program for the Safeguarding of Venice, for the Venice Civic Museums Foundation (MUVE) and for the Diocesan Museum in Udine, Italy.

**Jim Perry** is HT Morse Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota. He serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Fisheries and Wildlife and Director of Wildlife Care and Handling. His teaching and research advance ecosystem managemen<sup>t</sup> at the scale of large watersheds, with explicit attention to climate-based adaptation. This work focuses on resilience to advance climate change adaptation in large protected areas, notably natural World Heritage sites. His work is global and broadly applicable to watersheds as ecosystems and, more notably, to protected areas, including all natural World Heritage sites. Although the work is global in theme, it is always applied at the local scale. A recent edited volume (Harvey and Perry, 2015) reframes the ways that we consider heritage concepts as climates change. In a more focused review paper (Perry, 2015), he argues that climate change adaptation in World Heritage sites is a wicked problem (meeting several criteria for this definition) and that so-called clumsy solutions provide a way forward. Because this is a global problem, society must choose among sites to guide resource allocation. In support of such prioritization, he analyzed 208 natural UNESCO World Heritage Sites to build a global "hot spots" model that ranks sites and identifies those most at risk from climate change (Perry 2011). However, because climate change adaptation is always a local-scale action, he continued this work in collaboration with UNESCO to develop a climate change adaptation manual for managers of natural World Heritage sites or other protected areas (Perry and Falzon 2014). This manual guides any local manager in understanding the risks that climate change poses to his/her site and guides him/her toward adaptation strategies. This work was initially field-tested in Kenya and India, translated and available in three languages, and is being used worldwide. Some of the adaptation strategies offered are fine-scale (i.e., on-site) and some are coarse-scale (i.e., involving the surrounding landscape). To advance the latter, he worked with many others to develop an ecosystem-based approach to managing a watershed, catchment or landscape (e.g., one containing a World Heritage site or protected area) (Perry et al. 2012).

This ecosystem-scale work was developed in collaboration with UNEP and concluded with a global training program for ecosystem managemen<sup>t</sup> (Perry et al., 2012). This work was initially field-tested in Kenya and then deployed in a Train-the-Trainers phase, beginning with a 12-country workshop in South Korea. All of this work has been performed in the context of greater societal goals, goals that advance society's ability to recognize and adapt to new climate regimes. This work has recently been advanced with special attention to vulnerable communities in watersheds facing climate changes (Perry et al., 2018).

### **Preface to "World Heritage and Climate Change"**

World Heritage represents natural and cultural resources that are so exceptional that they should be forever conserved for all humankind. World Heritage sites and immovable and movable cultural heritage are of high significance, as they are a vital expression of the culture that makes a place or a community unique, and their loss could be catastrophic. However, many natural and cultural World Heritage sites are at continuous risk from climate change. There is an urgen<sup>t</sup> need to understand the ways in which the climate threatens various sites, immovable objects and artifacts, and to understand what adaptation strategies, if any, are appropriate for their conservation. The literature over the last 10 years is replete with discussions of risk assessments, planning strategies and adaptation plans. We are awash with information but impeded by a dearth of understanding. This Special Issue brings together a select group of authors, each of whom contributed to an understanding of World Heritage in a changing climate. Each invited paper addresses a subset of the natural or built environment and synthesizes what is known and what uncertainties face decision-makers and offers examples of tools or strategies to implement in situ. Among the proposed strategies are novel schemes of both the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change and ideas for monitoring the conservation status of the heritage site and/or object under examination.

Detailed past climate reconstructions of dangerous events and the simulation of future climate change scenarios are lacking at the World Heritage site scale. This knowledge is important for evaluating climate changes that currently threaten World Heritages and, even more so, changes that will threaten them in the future. Scarce knowledge is available about past climate at World Heritage sites that have been reconstructed using instrumental, documentary and paleoclimatic data. The reconstruction of multi-century series of temperature, precipitation, wind force and direction, relative humidity and the frequencies of floods and landslides that impact these sites could elucidate the real effects of the changes that we are observing. This type of knowledge allows us to improve the calibration of scenarios of changes over the near and distant future and clarifies the urgency of implementing adaptation measures.

> **Chiara Bertolin, Jim Perry** *Editors*
