Historic England’s (HE) Hana Morel, Head of Climate Change, explains how heritage is part of delivering solutions to climate change.
Historic England writes:
Heritage as a solution for responding to climate change
Across the UK, historic buildings, landscapes and places already play a powerful role in responding to environmental change. While the historic environment is often seen as something to be protected alongside climate action, in reality, it is one of the most important solutions we have for delivering it. A yellow brick office building with many windows against a blue cloudy sky
Climate action is often framed as a technical challenge – about energy systems, infrastructure and emissions. But at its core, it is also a question of how we live, how we relate to our environment, and how we make decisions about change. This is where heritage matters. Heritage is not separate from climate thinking: it is embedded within it. At a time when climate change demands rapid and far-reaching action, understanding and working with heritage is not about looking backwards – it is about drawing on one of our strongest assets for the future. From the way our buildings perform, to how resilient landscapes function, to the knowledge embedded in communities, the historic environment plays a critical role in shaping how we mitigate, adapt and respond to climate change. Indeed, it provides the foundations for effective, resilient and place-based climate action.
The ‘green’ or ‘circular’ economy
Alongside supporting decarbonisation, heritage and the historic environment are also central to regeneration and inclusive growth agendas. The sensitive reuse and retrofit of historic buildings could help unlock up to 670,000 potential new homes across England, while revitalising town centres, supporting local economies, and creating skilled jobs. In this way, heritage is not only a cultural asset, but a driver of sustainable growth, place-making, and long-term community resilience. Beyond buildings, historic landscapes play an important role through carbon storage and sequestration as well as water security and biodiversity, for example in peat, soils, woodlands, and long-managed landscapes.
Heritage is a key infrastructure for resilience
Heritage is part of the fabric all around us. It’s not just the built environment and landscapes. It’s our lives and livelihoods. It’s about how we function in the places we live, and how the environment responds to the way we live. The historic environment already contributes to climate resilience. For example:
- Traditional buildings often use passive design principles – thick walls, natural ventilation, shading, sustainable materials. Many homes were intentionally designed to reduce overheating and energy demand, and continue to perform well, if well maintained and repaired. This is set out in our webpages on energy efficiency and retrofit.
- Historic landscapes, such as wetlands, terraces, meadows, and water systems, have so many benefits if well maintained, and can support flood management, water purity, biodiversity, nature recovery, and much more such as health and wellbeing. Cultural landscapes evidence the long-term relationship and interaction between human activity and the natural environment, and that they are reflections of living history and cultures, traditions, and land-use practices. Our work on historic landscape characterisation can use this information to help create well-designed and sustainable places.
- Water has long been a central human concern, serving and sustaining societies through its provision to life, livelihoods, and other critical systems that are part of people and place. Coastal, intertidal zone, and marine environments are vital components of water heritage, which includes freshwater systems, wetlands, agricultural landscapes, canals, locks, harbours, port networks, waterfronts, and much more, including living heritage such as water engineering and regional practices. See our pages on the intertidal zone and coastal and marine.
- Settlement patterns and urban form are highly useful when thinking about sustainability, providing a long-term record of successes and failures for resource-efficient thinking and design. Shaped by local environmental conditions, they were designed to optimise human and resource needs, and think about passive climate control such as orientation towards the sun, shared courtyards and narrow streets to reduce overheating, sheltered locations to reduce wind exposure, circular principles, nature conservation, and even compactness and walkability. Some place names even point to local species, or flood risk areas, or even become a source of refuge in response to disasters.
Heritage enables community resilience
When we think of climate measures, often the focus is on mitigation and adaptation, with the aim of enhancing resilience, climate resilience. But climate resilience is not only a technical endeavour. It’s a social one too. People, communities should be at the heart of what we do. Communities are more resilient through having a strong sense of place, understanding their local environment, and engaging in shaping their futures. Heritage has an important role in supporting wellbeing.
We know that:
- Adaptation measures are more likely to be accepted and sustained when they resonate with local identity.
- Heritage can provide that shared hook and story for engaging communities in action.
- Culture, living heritage, and tangible heritage can inform locally appropriate responses.
- In this sense, heritage is not just about ‘assets’. It’s about legacy, agency and solutions.
One of the most powerful contributions of heritage to climate action is its ability to connect different ways of knowing and different ways of living. It spans across generations, spaces and time. Climate science of course, provides the essential, robust and credible evidence that we need to remain informed – but it is simply not sufficient on its own. We need to act using scientific data, local and traditional knowledge, lived experience, and social and cultural values. We need to know measures are grounded in real-world lives and contexts, and that they are possible to roll out through the support of communities and their values.
Historic England is not alone in seeing heritage as a bridge between different knowledge systems and an entry point for climate action. Climate action needs to be both technically sound and socially relevant.
As well as benefiting the wider community, action on climate change can increase the physical and financial resilience of heritage organisations, future-proofing them to continue caring for England’s heritage.
In this sense, heritage is not just something we need to retrofit. It is something we can actively work with to deliver resilience outcomes.
Heritage supports nature recovery
When we think of notable nature spots in England, we might think of stunning landscapes such as the Lake District, the Yorkshire Moors, Hadrian’s Wall Path. Natural landscapes are shaped by natural processes such as geology, climate, ecosystems, and water which form our mountains, wetlands, rivers and ancient woodlands. But the boundary is not so clear from what we call historic environments. Many ‘natural’ landscapes are actually heavily influenced by past and present human activity. They are shaped by people and nature over time.
Grassland in front of an old stone building.
Places such as agricultural landscapes (e.g., field systems, terraces, and hedges), or parklands and green spaces, managed woodlands and coastal environments, are from long-term human-nature interactions. They reflect practices developed over generations that sustain biodiversity, manage ecosystems, and support environmental systems (such as water management or soil conservation). Actually, historic landscapes are, in many ways, an intrinsic part of green and blue infrastructure. For more information, take a look at our pages on nature recovery and heritage.
Because there is a long story of the interconnectedness of human and natural systems, understanding the two as interconnected can help think about nature recovery. For example:
- Traditional land and water management practices can support soil health, carbon storage, and water security.
- Historic water systems can contribute to catchment-based approaches.
- Cultural landscapes can provide habitats shaped by sustainable use over time.
Heritage and nature recovery are often mutually reinforcing, as set out in our joint statement between Historic England, Natural England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Reaching Net Zero
Heritage is central to decarbonising the built environment and enables sustainable growth. Decarbonisation is a key measure in climate action and our commitment of reaching net zero. It’s about reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with how we build, use and manage our environments. In the context of buildings, it’s important to take a whole-life approach to carbon and recognise both operational emissions (such as energy use for heating and lighting) and embodied carbon (that already invested in existing buildings and materials) should be considered.
So the historic environment is central to decarbonisation, particularly of the built environment.
- The majority of the buildings that will exist in 2050 already exist today. With their long life-span, and the UK having the oldest building stock in Europe, many of these are historic. Decarbonisation is therefore not just about new build but fundamentally about working with existing buildings and raising awareness that they can absolutely be fit for the future, if well maintained, repaired and sensitively adapted.
- Older buildings embody significant amounts of carbon. Not only does retaining and reusing them avoid emissions associated with demolition and new construction, but it also moves us towards circular economy principles. If structural integrity is not in question, the materials and resource already invested in older buildings tend to be durable, resilient and robust.
- Historic buildings can perform well when a proportionate, whole-building approach to interventions are used. The challenge is not that they cannot be adapted, but that approaches must be tailored, evidence-based and sensitive to how these buildings function as a whole.
Where tensions do arise, they are often the result of:
- Mis-applying standardised retrofit solutions designed for modern buildings.
- Relying on simplified metrics (such as EPCs based on running cost) that do not reflect whole-building performance.
- Insufficient maintenance and repair before interventions are introduced.
These issues are often a result of how we maintain and repair older buildings, rather than a question of their resilience itself.
Heritage is evidence, not just legacy
At its most basic level, the historic environment is one of our richest sources of long-term environmental evidence. Old buildings and infrastructure, land-, coastal and marine environments and archaeological records tell us how people have persisted, adapted, and transformed under conditions of uncertainty and disruption over millennia: how settlements were constructed to cope with flooding, how materials performed in different climates, how land was managed sustainably over time. These are not just stories. They are real-world records and accounts of adaptation and transformation.
Heritage holds evidence of past human responses to environmental change and recovery from environmental stress. It embeds an understanding of what we know about environments, land and water use as well as resource stewardship that has been developed and passed down over generations.
At a time when climate change is often characterised by uncertainty, heritage provides something invaluable: insights, knowledge and skills that have lasted the test of time over long time-frames.
Moving beyond the storytelling narrative
Heritage is often framed as contributing to climate action through storytelling that helps raise awareness, shape narratives, and connect people to place. This is important. But it’s not the full picture of what heritage can offer. Understanding the historic environment can also provide:
- Data (long-term environmental records).
- Infrastructure (buildings and landscapes that support sustainable resilience).
- Methods (approaches to understanding communities and managing change over time).
- Systems thinking (understanding interconnections between people, place and structures).
In other words, heritage is not just about communication. It is about delivery: from the design, feasibility and effectiveness of mitigation and adaptation measures to the benefits gained across people and place.
Conclusion: Historic England’s role in enabling climate action
Whether supporting the reuse of existing buildings, helping shape successful and climate-resilient places, or equipping the sector with the evidence, skills and tools needed to respond to a changing world, our aim is the same: to bring new life to heritage in ways that help build a better future for every place and everyone.
At Historic England, we focus our expertise and resources on delivering public value. Our Strategic Plan 2026–2031 highlights our determination to unlock the full potential of heritage through our priorities of Growth, Place and Sector, and our work on climate change is part of that.
Our climate change work is ultimately about how we can mainstream climate adaptation as part of sustainable growth, place-making and sector resilience. Through a more systems-based approach, we are exploring how climate policy and heritage policy can be more aligned to ensure better outcomes for people and place.
A key part of this work is strengthening the evidence base needed to support decision-making. We continue to improve understanding of climate risk and opportunities across the historic environment through our research, advice, guidance and partnerships, and work towards practical tools that support adaptation and resilience. This includes improving our understanding of how climate impacts interact across buildings, landscapes, communities and infrastructure, and how responses can be designed to deliver multiple benefits.
Our participation in the Adaptation Reporting Power (ARP) process with the English Heritage Trust is an important part of this approach. Such processes help us identify opportunities for action and, with partners, address organisational and sector-wide capability and capacity for a more strategic understanding of resilience, adaptation pathways and long-term decision-making. Ultimately, our work is not simply about protecting heritage from climate change. It is about recognising the heritage as part of the solution and strengthening the evidence, capability and capacity needed for adaptation so that, together, we can ensure that heritage contributes to the transition towards a more resilient, sustainable and prosperous future. The challenge is not whether to include heritage in climate thinking. It is how quickly we can move from seeing it as peripheral to recognising it as fundamental.
