**1. Introduction**

In the coming decades, climate change risks to various socioeconomic and natural systems are expected to increase due to projected anthropogenic climate changes, demographic development, and land-use changes [1]. These changes are increasingly being recognised as threat multipliers for global natural and cultural heritage via their interaction with other stressors, thereby accelerating existing risks and creating new ones [1–3]. An initial report on climate change and World Heritage (WH) properties (The term 'World Heritage properties' is used as indicated in the documents of the W System (Article 3 of the WH Convention). [4] stated that natural heritage may be jeopardised, whereas cultural properties (in addition to physical threats) will experience social and cultural impacts. In 2008,

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) released the 'Policy Document on the Impacts of Climate Change on World Heritage Properties'. The document highlights that 'communities [have changed] the way they live, work, worship and socialize in buildings, sites and landscapes, [some] migrating and abandoning their built heritage'; the document further suggests that 'climate change will be considered in all aspects of nominating, managing, monitoring and reporting on the status of these properties' [5]. Accordingly, it follows recognising that in addition to 'the overarching objective of safeguarding the outstanding universal values of WH properties', these properties must 'serve as laboratories where monitoring, mitigation and adaptation processes can be applied, tested and improved' [5]. However, recent studies [3,6,7] found that heritage conservation practice has primarily focused on reactive measures that are taken after climate change impacts occur; these impacts include damage or loss to heritage properties [6,8,9].

The primary concern of WH decision makers and policymakers is maintaining the physical characteristics of heritage assets, through which their outstanding universal value (OUV) is conveyed [10,11]. This refers to the exceptional cultural or natural significance of WH properties [12]. Two aspects that warrant debate are embedded in the operationalisation of such requirements, which presents challenges to WH properties in terms of addressing climate change. The first is that conservation of WH values are often operationalised through static values and physical delimitations related to developing and managing properties [13–15]. The second consideration is that heritage values are categorised as natural and cultural, and their definition and monitoring are undertaken by di fferent disciplinary entities [16,17]. Moreover, the fact that climate action related to WH has predominantly focused on risk and vulnerability assessments of their OUV [18] is linked to State party efforts that seek to avoid their properties being included in the list of WH in danger or even lose their designation as WH by being removed from the WH List [10]. The interest between State Parties to secure at any cost the positioning of their properties on the WH List, and the WH Centre and advisory bodies' e fforts to promote transparent and ethical conservation practices, are increasingly clashing, rendering the WH Committee (WHCOM) a highly politicised arena [19]. This situation has not only damaged the credibility of the WHCOM but has also undermined the capacity of the WH monitoring system to provide fully transparent information about conservation processes [20].

The WH Centre and advisory bodies have made concrete e fforts to advance systemic conceptualisations of heritage alongside sustainable conservation practices. Examples include recommendations and guidelines for the implementation of landscape approaches for managing the evolving character of properties' OUV [16,21], the integration of sustainable development perspectives to the processes of the World Heritage Convention (WHC) [22], as well as recent e fforts to engage WH conservation in climate action [3,23]. Yet more consideration is needed in both research and practice to assess the e fficiency of actions taken, and to explore or implement proactive measures that include WH values and aspects of climate change decision-making processes (e.g., designing and/or implementing efficient climate adaptation actions for WH properties) before impacts occur.

To address this gap, this paper recognises climate change as an adaptive challenge fundamentally linked to beliefs, values, and worldviews, as well as to power, politics, identity, and interests [24]. We consider a landscape-based approach to heritage conservation as a crucial strategy for overcoming the climate change challenge and biological and cultural diversity losses [16,25,26]. Using these concepts as a theoretical basis, this research explores how climate change is currently being discussed within the WH monitoring system. It o ffers a state of practice in relation to how WH properties (natural, mixed, and cultural) are implementing landscape-based approaches to the conservation and managemen<sup>t</sup> of their OUV within the context of climate uncertainty and environmental change. To do this, we selected State of Conservation (SOC) reports to provide an overview of practice across time, categories, and geographical regions. SOC reports have largely been discussed in the literature as proof of the politicised conformation of the WH List [20,27] and have been criticised for lacking reliable measures to ensure the e ffective conservation of WH properties over time [28]. These reports have also proven to be a key source for providing valuable information on trends of conservation practices and on factors

affecting the conservation of properties [29]. The empirical analyses presented herein identifies four landscape principles based on theory that are increasingly shaping the debate around climate change issues regarding WH properties. Although these are highly relevant for advancing much-needed collaboration among scientific disciplines and governance sectors, we argue that deeper understanding is required about the transformational process of heritage values and of the nature–culture relationship.

### **2. Landscape-Based Conservation and Monitoring Under Climate Change**

The theoretical paradigm that leads conservation practice within the WH framework is based on a dichotomy [30,31], according to the naturalist ontology that influenced Western modern science, as it draws a distinction between humans and their natural environment [32,33]. This is exemplified by a distinction between natural and cultural heritage (defined in Articles 1 and 2 of the 1972 WH Convention) and the establishment of their respective advisory bodies. These include the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for natural properties and the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) for cultural properties. This division often causes clashes between the benefits of conserving natural values and those associated with cultural or social values, leading to competing priorities and conflicting interests in decision-making processes [34]. This is exacerbated to the extent that the conservation of socially constructed natural and cultural heritage values may become disassociated from their environmental settings and (climatic) processes [24,25,35,36].

There is growing consensus in the scientific literature [37–39] regarding the value of a landscape-based approach to conservation, which can help to bridge the conceptual gap between nature and culture. From this integrative perspective, heritage places include people, their built environments and practices, local ecosystems and other ecological processes. Although landscape-based approaches originated in the field of nature conservation [40,41], over the past decade, the cultural sector has also made e fforts for its implementation [42–44]. Furthermore, landscape-based conservation practices are recognised for their potential to connect policy and practice at multiple interacting spatial levels via the implementation of adaptive and integrated managemen<sup>t</sup> systems [38]. Moreover, landscape-based approaches are being consolidated as integrated solutions for addressing sustainability challenges, and to contribute to the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SGD) of Agenda 2030 [25,45]. In the following subsections, we present common principles of landscape approaches discussed in the fields of natural and cultural conservation. These serve as analytical dimensions of the landscape-based approach and help to organise the primary findings presented in section three.

### *2.1. Landscape Scale and Governance*

Landscape scale is acknowledged as a field in which various entities, including humans, interact according to physical, biological, and social rules that determine their relationships [46–48]. Here, the upscaling of conservation actions (generally targeting individual species or monuments) to an entire landscape helps to understand how objects of conservation relate to one another and how they are part of economic, environmental, social and cultural change processes [26,49,50]. In this way, landscape scale represents the wider physical/spatial context in which heritage resources are located, encompassing all possible interactions within a system [51], including the urban context [29]. Hence, conservation that employs a landscape-based approach requires managing the co-benefits and trade-o ffs between a wide range of stakeholders. In this way, conservation becomes a process of negotiation, decision making and re-evaluation that is expected to be informed by science but shaped by human values and preferences [46,49].

A shared conservation vision requires a governance structure for the coordination of di fferent levels of organisation, assessment and implementation of measures. Thus, landscape governance involves the institutions, organisations, and mechanisms by which communities currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global bio-geophysical systems [52]. The processes of institutionalising climate change approaches that facilitate e ffective internal networks toward

collaboration and the resolution of complex objectives are often generally poorly understood in heritage managemen<sup>t</sup> that deals with climate change, but also in climate change governance [34,53,54].

### *2.2. Evidence-Based Decision Making*

Evidence-based decision making is a critical aspect for the normative of landscape [46] and adaptive managemen<sup>t</sup> [55]. Mapping, assessment, and monitoring tools are expected to facilitate research activities for the description of socioecological systems. Based on this evidence, stakeholders can improve their capacity to judge and respond to manage heritage resources in transforming environments [56–58]. Consequently, monitoring using a landscape-based approach can provide a basis for revising and improving managemen<sup>t</sup> and conservation practices by considering the complexity of human institutions and behaviours in the context of environmentally driven change [46,59]. In practice, this requires transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches that are able to validate different data levels and sources [29,60]. To articulate the evidence needed and produced by different stakeholders into individual value systems, a shared conservation vision must be agreed on alongside the coordination of activities for implementing relevant measures [61,62]. This requires all stakeholders to consider the outcomes of a shared conservation vision from a more holistic perspective [63,64].

### *2.3. Adaptation Measures and the Resilience of Natural and Cultural Heritage*

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [1], the climate change adaptation of WH properties involves a decision-making process that seeks to reduce the vulnerability of WH areas to climate change and creating WH resilience to current and future climate change impacts [1]. Adaptation processes must consider the design and implementation of measures that can increase the resilience of landscape values and attributes [46,50] while ensuring that cultural and/or natural significance is not adversely affected or lost [65]. Plieninger et al. [14] discuss how landscape governance has been dominated by a conservation approach in which designated areas with special features should not change. Consequently, some studies have highlighted the importance of developing and operationalising landscape-based managemen<sup>t</sup> frameworks to enable the safeguarding of heritage values and attributes while at the same time allowing for change [49,66]. However, discussion on the thresholds of 'acceptable change' remains at an early stage, particularly on the topics of climate change mitigation and adaptation fields [65,67–69]; a larger focus has been on socioeconomic development and its impacts on WH properties [70–72].

To sustain landscape processes and associated heritage values long-term, landscape resilience (the capacity to absorb and recover from impacts) represents a vital aspect of climate change decisionmaking processes [1,3]. The key elements in building heritage resilience include social/adaptive learning and the monitoring of changes [73,74]. Monitoring is a valuable tool for generating data and knowledge that can serve as a basis for informed decision making in managing WH properties within a changing climate environment [68,75].
