Coastal Risk and Priority Places
Author(s): LUC
This project centred on the creation of an interactive map resource that displays heritage assets sensitive to coastal change. In order to achieve this, the project reviewed currently available data and research to develop indices of coastal vulnerability and heritage sensitivity. The combination of these two indices provides one possible method of identifying areas where heritage assets are most at risk from coastal processes – coastal heritage ‘priority places’. The focus of this study has been heritage assets captured in the National Heritage List for England (NHLE). Historic England has made a considerable investment in ensuring that the significance of heritage assets within the coastal zone is recognised through the Rapid Coastal Zone Assessment Survey (RCZAS) programme. This study will add value to this work by providing further detail about the vulnerability of these assets to coastal processes, enabling Historic England to: • Identify where the risk of damage to, and loss of, coastal heritage assets is most pressing; • Better understand the drivers of change and the rates at which they are operating; and • Provide a framework for prioritisation. The project’s key outputs are GIS data and an interactive webmap with supporting documentation and a project report. The project outputs are intended to have a wide audience, ranging from internal staff and researchers at Historic England to partner organisations and ultimately members of the public. Execution of this research project presented a number of challenges in terms of data access, data structure and scoring heritage sensitivity. The evaluation of datasets concluded that no perfect dataset exists for such an assessment, but that this is an area of continual development and it is anticipated that better datasets will emerge in the near future. The focus has therefore been on developing a method that can accommodate better datasets in the future as they become available.
- Report Number:
- 37/2019
- Series:
- Research Report
- Pages:
- 135
- Keywords:
- Heritage Coastal
