Globally, cultural and natural heritage are increasingly affected by fires, a situation further exacerbated by climate change. The loss of tangible and intangible heritage, negative impacts on local communities, and extensive adverse environmental effects, including on vegetation, wildlife, water resources, air quality, and biodiversity, are often long-lasting and sometimes permanent. Limited awareness, planning, implementing, and monitoring of risk management plans, coupled with the loss and limited integration of traditional knowledge and practices into fire risk management policies, as well as the lack of community participation, pose considerable challenges to an effective fire risk management of cultural and natural heritage.
However, rather than the mere protection of assets in the context of fire disasters, it is important to note that heritage plays an important role in mitigating fire risks and strengthening resilience. This includes engaging traditional ecological knowledge, skills, and practices to mitigate fire related disaster risks which can significantly contribute to the preservation and restoration of the ecosystem in which heritage exists. In response to these increasing challenges, UNESCO has scaled up efforts to safeguard cultural and natural heritage from fire hazards and leverage them for resilience building. This paper shares features and contents of the Fire Risk Management Guide for Cultural and Natural Heritage developed with the aim to create awareness on the challenges in mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery to help strengthen the capacities of relevant stakeholders in the management of fire risks impacting on cultural and natural heritage.
In PROCULTHER-NET 2 Project. Technical Bulletin N. 5, July 2025, pp 69-75.
Hazard types
Geographic focus
Sectors