Curating transformation can strengthen adaptation and minimize losses and damages

Cities are vulnerable to climate change. They are particularly at risk from sea level rise, flooding, drought and heat waves². As early as 2040 Africa and Asia will have an additional 2.29 million and 16.36 million people exposed to coastal flooding respectively¹. This will impact coastal heritage with many cities at the coast losing part or all of their significant ‘places’²².

In 2016, ISIS destroyed almost 90% of the archeological remains of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nimrud²³. Although a casualty of conflict, not climate change, it presents a lesson in curating significant places, past and present, by recording their history and archeology, preserving their cultural attributes, and educating their communities and the wider public on their significance. This not only enables the re-presentation and valuation of what remains but also gives people agency over what is lost.

Nimrud, like other great ancient cities—Angkhor Wat, Teotihuacán, Machu Picchu—stood as a testament to remarkable human endeavor and creativity. To the Iraqi people, it evidenced the achievements of their nation’s past, while its ‘ancientness’ and authenticity added to its cultural value²³. The destruction of Nimrud is on one level a catastrophe, but the city has been recorded, analyzed and interpreted, in academic journals, books, art, movies and fiction, while its material remains are housed in museums around the world. As such, even in its destruction its intrinsic cultural value and significance have not been lost. Moreover, its destruction offers an opportunity to undertake modern excavations²⁴, which will provide new insights into how people living in agglomerated settlements negotiated urban planning, and such fundamentals as mobility, walkability, local self-sufficiency, gastronomy and healthy living⁹. New excavations would not have been possible had the extant remains not been destroyed. Far from being lost, its continued curation ensures its previous iterations are remembered and valued even while new excavations reveal more ancient aspects of the city and give it new value.

The planet is on track to warm by more than 2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures within 30 years and possibly by 3 °C towards the end of the century if we continue current greenhouse gas emissions¹. In this scenario, transformational adaptation pathways will become both increasingly difficult and necessary, with low-income countries, marginalized communities, and some minority groups being at greater risk of reaching limits to adaptation and the potential for maladaptation^21,25. The traditional lifeways of First Nations hunters and Arctic Indigenous communities are at the forefront of this challenge, being at risk of poor outcomes for both transformational and transformative adaptation.

Key elements for positive transformative adaptation include: (1) making rights and justice the target of adaptation, (2) acknowledging power relations, (3) embracing knowledge pluralism, (4) fostering bottom-up coalitions to strengthen local sources of adaptation, and (5) recognizing risks, trade-offs and unexpected outcomes²¹. Knowledge exchange between First Nations hunters and Arctic Indigenous communities is a heritage example of where these five key elements have been successfully put into practice with legislative commitment from the Canadian Government²⁵.

In the Arctic Circle the loss of sea ice, which is classified as World Heritage by UNESCO, is impacting Indigenous (Inuit) traditional lifeways by limiting their ability to hunt seals and whales²⁵. In response, knowledge exchange between First Nations hunters and Arctic Indigenous communities is transforming the ways in which Inuit hunt, which helps to preserve traditional ways of life and ways of remembering what has been lost. First Nations hunters from the Northwest Territories are building capacity and providing skills to Labrador Inuit related to moose harvesting. In exchange, Labrador Inuit are sharing their expertise in harvesting, processing, and use of ringed seals. As traditional sources of food become scarcer and as the ecological niche of moose moves north, new ways of hunting for Labrador Inuit will bring about positive transformative adaptation, engendering resilience and keeping alive ways of life, even as traditional modes of hunting are impeded by changing environments^25,26.

Pacific island communities will experience considerable economic and non-economic losses and damages from climate change in the future. Recent research has shown that non-economic losses and damages amongst Pacific Island communities are understood, perceived, and experienced through the lens of intangible values, identity, and cultural landscapes⁴. A considerable challenge for climate change adaptation to losses and damages will be preserving the living heritage of Pacific Island communities. For Pacific Islanders, the land of their ancestral home is a sacred space. A plot of land is inhabited by the same family for generations and cannot be assessed in purely economic terms. Ancestors are buried within its boundaries, and these are believed to live on as the spiritual guardians who watch over the family and protect the land. Western perspectives of home ownership do not fully grasp the extent to which the loss of family land can directly contribute to the loss of Pacific Islander identity²⁷. By drawing on the concept and praxis of curating transformation, Pacific Island communities can ensure that the loss of their homeland does not also entail the loss of their identity.

Increasingly, museums are playing a key role in the continuity of identity and social practice of Pacific Island peoples. The very real cultural damage associated with forced migration, an inevitable outcome of rising seas, is inspiring innovative exhibitions curated by Pacific Islanders. Interventions into museum programming, acquisitions, research and publication have reset the aims of these exhibitions away from ‘showing culture’ to ‘producing culture’²⁷. In 2019, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum in Aotearoa New Zealand created a new exhibition space Te Taigo (‘nature’), where different aspects of climate change impacts on the lives of Pacific Islanders are presented. This people-centered exhibition space asks its audiences to take on the role of guardians, and by so doing, the exhibition situates itself and its audiences within the context of climate action (https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/te-taiao-nature-exhibition-new-benchmark-for-new-generation) giving agency to people and enabling participatory curation of change.

Best practice in climate change adaptation includes meaningful participation of diverse groups in decision-making processes, the recognition that equitable power relations are key to successful outcomes, that the co-production of diverse knowledge offers greater legitimacy for adaptation solutions, that grassroots coalitions empower from the ground up, and that there will always be risks and unexpected outcomes²¹.

Curating transformation offers three further guiding principles from heritage conservation, the most important being the recognition that different kinds of value are intrinsic to successful adaptation outcomes. Identifying and understanding what is valued will determine what are considered intolerable, tolerable, and acceptable losses and damages³. Second is anticipatory recording of what is valued and making this equitably accessible via different media. Finally, learning encourages informed and active participation across different stakeholders. Experts should use their knowledge and skills to encourage and enable others to continuously and iteratively learn how best to respond to climate change²⁸. There is also a need for language that informs dialog about loss that enables communities to describe and debate the process of loss and provide some structure to help people address what is an intractable state of change¹².

Heritage practice provides a template for climate change adaptation that balances action to minimize losses and damages where such action is possible, and the management of unavoidable losses and damages where it is not. Curating transformation, as practiced in the heritage sector, provides three new guiding principles for advancing both transformational and transformative adaptation: (1) identifying what is valued, (2) ensuring it is recorded before it is lost, and (3) engaging with people about its significance to enable acceptance and ‘letting go’ in relation to what cannot be saved, while salvaging value for current and future generations^3,27. Curating transformation provides a context in which new value can be created, communicated, and adopted through anticipation of and adaptation to future loss. Through recognition of both economic and non-economic values, curating transformation holds the potential to deliver adaptation outcomes that are both more positive and more pragmatic than those driven by conventional decision-making based on tangible assets and economic values. Further, it helps overcome the false dichotomy of ‘economic’ and ‘non-economic’ dimensions in research and policy through its ability to capture tangible and intangible heritage value²⁹. Inclusive decision-making processes that recognize the diversity of perceptions and values relating to what is at risk address the needs and priorities of those who are most vulnerable and whose voices are often ignored. Curating transformation can reduce the risk of maladaptation that is inherent in preservation-based approaches that are unrealistic in the face of large climate change impacts.