Today’s most pressing climate problems require expert attention. But who, really, are the experts?
U.S. climate researcher Victoria Herrmann has a doctorate in geography and a specialization in polar studies, and she’s an official National Geographic “Explorer.” But when she worked on “America’s Eroding Edges,” a 2017 study of shoreline communities facing rising sea levels, she learned to shut up and just listen. Herrmann was the so-called expert on climate change, but the 350 community leaders interviewed for her study knew their communities best – and they pointed her toward local threats and crises she’d never studied in school.
The story Herrmann most likes to tell is of an activist in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, who showed her how climate change and culture are indelibly linked. He described how high seas, stronger winds and hotter temperatures were pushing more salt water onto agricultural land, reducing taro production. The starchy root vegetable is more than a staple food in Polynesia – it’s a cultural icon, a connection to the spirit, and a symbol of prosperity. To farmers in American Samoa, rising tides threaten not just their land and livelihood, but the meaning of their lives.
“Climate change, at its core, is a story about losing the things that make us who we are,” Herrmann told National Geographic, which helped fund the project. “The way we tell this story and find climate change solutions has to include our history and our culture and these intimate parts of us.”
The realization that the climate crisis is both a global phenomenon and a million different local disasters spurred Herrmann and National Geographic to form a new climate-adaptation initiative called Preserving Legacies: A Future for Our Past. Founded in 2022 in Washington, D.C., the project aims to help cultural heritage sites around the world – from the ninth-century Angkor temples of Cambodia to the 17th-century Spanish fortress of Cartagena, Colombia, and the wine cellars of France’s Champagne region – counter the destructive threats of climate change by devising their own place-based mitigation plans. (According to UNESCO, one in six cultural heritage sites is at risk of climate-related destruction.)
Preserving Legacies, which is sponsored by Canadian financial giant Manulife, isn’t in the business of telling its clients what to do. Taking a “train the trainers” approach, the initiative uses global climate models to create personalized threat analyses for each site to identify their likeliest risks from climate change, from flooding to crop failures to wildfires. It then offers these local “heritage custodians” a proven format for engaging local stakeholders – including Indigenous people, elders, artists, women and youth – in carefully assessing the risks and most optimal outcomes. In the end, each group prepares its own customized adaptation plan, building community and resilience throughout the process.
With Preserving Legacies active now in 35 countries, Herrmann hopes to extend the program to hundreds of cultural sites on every continent: “That is my big goal – that it reaches everyone.”
Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.
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