Cultural Heritage

Over the last decades, as a consequence of the effects of climate change, Cultural Heritage has been impacted by an increasing number of climate related hazards, posing new challenges to conservators and heritage managers. Disasters and catastrophes pose risks not only to the conservation of cultural heritage assets with its cultural, historic and artistic values, but also to the safety of visitors, staff and local communities. Additionally, they cause undoubtedly negative consequences for the local economies. Cultural Heritage must be considered social and economic sector that needs to be preserved, protected and improved to evolve a cultural resource into a sustainable and profitable community value.

MEEO started working on the impact of climate change to cultural heritage in 2013 with a pilot activity co-funded by Italian Space Agency to demonstrate how satellite data can support the monitoring of relevant UNESCO sites for what concerns air pollution damages. From that experience MEEO has never stopped working in this domain supporting several European research projects bringing experience and knowledge in climate indicators, atmospheric parameters, data exploitation platform and research/public data management.

In the World HEritage monitoring by Remote sEnsing – WHERE project (2014) MEEO implemented the air pollutants mapping service to extract the thermal stress, the carbon surface deposition and the surface erosion indexes. In HERACLES project MEEO supported its branch company SISTEMA in the extraction of both remote sensing and local climate parameters impacting cultural heritages sites. In STRENCH project MEEO provides the technological background to SISTEMA for what concerns the extreme weather events data management and data exploitation.