Heritage Now! is a global campaign to harness the potential of built heritage for a resilient, climate positive and just future.
Heritage Now writes:
- Most attention in policy is going to new buildings, but the majority of carbon emissions today are associated with operating the buildings that already exist.
- Most climate policy treats heritage as an afterthought, but heritage solutions apply to most of the built environment, including new buildings.
- Most climate solutions in the building sector are firmly rooted in technical knowledge, but heritage offers proven alternative approaches that inspire people to action through culture.
Heritage Now! promotes Heritage-Informed Decarbonization. Heritage-Informed Decarbonization applies wisdom, practices, and built places of the past to minimize greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment in the present and future.
Recommendations for Heritage-Informed Decarbonization
- Climate action is both a technological and cultural challenge, and built heritage is uniquely placed to unite technological and cultural solutions. Heritage-informed decarbonization both directly reduces greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment and catalyzes needed cultural shifts to reimagine a sustainable and resilient future.
- Learn from the greatest living laboratory for climate adaptation – the existing built environment.: The places that make up built heritage both illustrate how human habitation has responded to climate over millennia and provide a unique test bed for integrating old and new climate technologies for future climate adaptation.
- Prioritize continued building (re)use and care: There is no pathway to a liveable climate without addressing existing buildings. Heritage-informed approaches to (re)use both avoid embodied emissions of new construction while reducing operational emissions of existing buildings and preserve sense of place.
- Implement place-based solutions to build, maintain, and live sustainably: From bio-based, local materials to context-specific passive comfort strategies, heritage both offers scientifically-supported lessons for low-carbon design, construction, maintenance, and use and fosters a culture of care that passes down local practices.
- Reframe building waste as a resource: Heritage construction and maintenance practices around the world are founded in circularity both demonstrating how to extend the use of buildings and materials and supporting a marketplace that sees resources in place of waste.
- Include heritage and indigenous voices in climate policymaking: The inclusion of heritage perspectives in decision-making both connects planning and policy with vital knowledge of how to build in balance with the environment and engages communities in the all-of-society response needed to address climate change.
