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Top1. Introduction
Natural disasters are an unavoidable part of life on Earth. Such events date back to the earliest human recordings of the world around them. But due to global warming and increased temperatures in the world’s oceans, the intensity and frequency of natural disaster events is increasing. Rising sea levels are a byproduct of global warming, and one that affects coastal communities worldwide. Intertwined with the need to increase disaster resilience in coastal communities is the need to protect their cultural heritage. Cultural heritage refers to both tangible and intangible entities related to their surrounding communities, including structures, districts, belief systems, tragedies, and social memory (Jigyasu et al. 2013). Cultural heritage preservation is not a field typically associated with the study of climate change, yet these two seemingly disparate fields are intertwined and critical to the perpetuation of human culture (Fatoric and Seekamp 2017, Bedeaux et al. 2018, ICOMOS 2019, Sesana, E. et al. 2020). Culture is an integral part of the way humans perceive, understand, and interact with the world (Jigyasu et al. 2013, Roncoli et al. 2016). The perpetuation of human culture is critical to the continuation of human existence, and the risk of losing the physical representations of human history grows each year with increases in urbanization, natural disasters, conflict and climate change. In this way, the preservation of cultural resources is directly connected to disaster risk management.
Cultural resources are of great importance to their respective communities. The lack of public awareness of the cultural heritage around them leads to a loss of the influence of cultural heritage on daily life, including its importance to the economy, tourism, the ecosystem, community solidarity, the perpetuation of human history, and natural disaster resilience. There are more than 13,000 archaeological and historic sites along the US Atlantic coast. More than 1,000 of these sites are culturally significant and are at risk of flood damage or destruction (Reeder-Myers, Leslie A. 2015, Anderson et al. 2017). As a result, it is critical for coastal communities to work together to increase their resilience to disaster events like floods. Despite all the evidence in support of making cultural heritage a part of disaster management, there is a lack of support in the realm of climate adaptation for cultural resource preservation and management (Xiao et al. 2019, Quesada-Ganiza et al. 2020). Empirical data and analysis are limited in the current body of research on the implications of climate change to cultural heritage and the subsequent impacts (socio-psychological effects) to human society of losing the physical representation of our cultural history. These issues express a necessity of conducting academic research to better understand the connection between cultural heritage and disaster resilience and the ability of existing planning frameworks to account for cultural heritage preservation at the community level.
This research considers several examples of cultural heritage’s importance in infrastructure planning worldwide, and the necessity of protecting cultural resources from natural disaster risks, specifically flood risks and the value of cultural heritage to a community’s ecosystem, economy, and identity. It seeks to characterize the importance of cultural heritage to Savannah, Georgia, and how detrimental it would be to the community, the economy, and the ecosystem to lose these sites, especially in a state that perpetuates disbelief in the science backing the phenomenon of global warming (Jigyasu et al. 2013, Murphy 2017). The authors believe the findings of this research adds empirical data and knowledge on the impacts of climate change to cultural heritage at the community level and will enable policy makers to better understand the intersection between disaster resilience and cultural heritage preservation.