A proposed assessment index for climate change-related risk for cultural heritage protection in Newcastle (Australia) Giuseppe Forino n , Jamie MacKee, Jason von Meding School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle, University Dr, Callaghan NSW 2308, Australia article info Article history: Received 14 March 2016 Received in revised form 9 September 2016 Accepted 10 September 2016 Available online 13 September 2016 Keywords: Climate change Cultural heritage Australia Disaster risk reduction Risk assessment Index abstract Worldwide, climate change is one of the main factors exacerbating the effects of hazards or generating additional risk. Investigation is required to understand climate change-related risks for all components of human systems, including cultural heritage. Accordingly, this paper aims to present a new risk assess- ment index for cultural heritage, referred to as the Cultural Heritage Risk Index (CHRI). The paper applies a desk-based review of the existing literature on climate change-related risks for cultural heritage and of multi-level policy and planning documents of cultural heritage management in Australia. The paper then presents the CHRI and describes its attributes based upon the formalisation of risk as a function of ha- zard, exposure and vulnerability. CHRI is applied to a unique asset of cultural heritage in Newcastle (Australia), the Burwood Beach Wastewater Treatment Works (BBWTW). The paper shows that this asset has a moderate risk related to climate change, and that some interventions can be applied to decrease its vulnerability. The use of a new index such as CHRI allows creating a baseline for the exploration of the relations between climate change-related risks and cultural heritage. It can be an effective part of tools assessing climate change-related risk on cultural heritage in Australia and might aid in prioritising specific interventions. & 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Worldwide, climate change is perceived as a slow-onset pro- cess, dangerous for peoples and assets [54], which intensifies some of the hazards affecting social systems and weakens resilience in facing uncertainty and disasters [49]. While climate change and associated processes are fully embraced by disaster-related efforts, the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduc- tion (UNISDR) call for framing climate change within a disaster risk perspective [8,31]. The milestone document by IPCC ‘Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation’ [20] reports the likelihood of increased weather ex- tremes in the future, suggesting that the number and the extent of weather- and climate-related hazards may increase [31]. The in- teraction of such hazards with vulnerable systems which have low adaptation capacity is expected to lead to severe and sometime irreversible impacts [50]. However, the extent for which damages and losses by disasters can be attributed to climate change is still debated and uncertain (e.g. [6,7,18,22,32,33,49,50,56]). Among assets of social systems for which climate change poses a disaster risk, cultural heritage requires particular attention [10,25,31,39,41,48,59,60,69]. Cultural heritage represents the physical manifestation of past human activities and interactions with the environment, with different meanings for different in- dividuals and communities [24,34,62]. According to Article 1 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Convention [67], cultural heritage includes moveable tangible heritage items such as paintings, sculptures, coins and manu- scripts; immovable heritage such as monuments, archaeological sites and underwater cultural heritage such as shipwrecks, un- derwater ruins and cities; and intangible items such as oral tra- ditions, performing arts and rituals ([67], see also [2]). These items indicate the ‘valuable features of our environment which we seek to conserve from the ravages of development and decay’ (Da- vidson, 1991, p. 1, cited in [34], p. 66). In this sense, cultural heri- tage enriches “people's lives, often providing a deep and inspira- tional sense of connection to community and landscape, to the past and to lived experience” ([29], p. 1). It has a historic, aesthetic, social, scientific or spiritual value for past, present, and future generations [39], and often represents the only remnants of peo- ple, historical processes or traditional events [62]. Therefore, decisions have to be made in some contexts about the degree of protection to be assigned to single or multiple cul- tural heritage assets [48]. While it can be argued that some assets Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijdrr International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2016.09.003 2212-4209/& 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. n Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: g.forino@gmail.com (G. Forino), Jamie.mackee@newcastle.edu.au (J. MacKee), Jason.vonmeding@newcastle.edu.au (J. von Meding). International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 19 (2016) 235–248