What future lie ahead in the face of climate change?

Cultural heritage global governance and UNESCO'S climate policy in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between cultural heritage and the climate emergency, arguing that the intensification of extreme events exposes the limits of the modern preservationist paradigm, grounded in stability, material authenticity, and the ideal of perpetual conservation. Drawing on dialogue between environmental history, climate anthropology, and heritage studies, it argues that landscapes, cultural practices, and regimes of memory are co-produced through interaction with specific climatic dynamics, and that climate should therefore be understood as a historical and political operator. The central focus is to investigate how changes in climatic regimes destabilize sociocultural arrangements and territorialities, generating new forms of heritage vulnerability, both tangible and intangible, that disproportionately affect historically marginalized communities. The article mobilizes institutional documents, with particular emphasis on the Policy Document on Climate Action for World Heritage, analyzed as a historical source that reflects the transition of heritage from a regime of permanence to a grammar of risk, adaptation, and loss management. It concludes by arguing for an epistemological revision of the concept of cultural heritage, informed by socio-environmental and historical perspectives capable of articulating climate justice, community participation, and contested futures in the context of the Anthropocene.