Training and exercise: an effective approach to build cultural heritage protection capacity

Training is the last step of preparedness. An emergency plan is not operational until it has been put into practice, vetted and upgraded, in a continuous improvement cycle. Conducting exercises is therefore necessary to test emergency plans, to practice technical gestures such as handling and packing of movable heritage, to be ready to respond to unforeseen contingencies and, last but not least, to learn to work together as a multi-disciplinary team. Such experience was provided to the experts who took part in the Protecting Cultural Heritage Course - PCH, a pilot course for training cultural heritage experts to be potentially deployed within the Union Civil Protection Mechanism. These training sessions were implemented in 2023, within the framework of the DG ECHO-funded project PROCULTHER-NET, with the main objective of bringing closer and creating a link between the disaster risk and the cultural heritage managers and based on the experiences gained by both sectors.