Protecting cultural heritage from the consequences of disasters - PROCULTHER is the initiative co-financed by the Directorate General of European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG-ECHO) within the framework of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism - UCPM and designed to develop and improve technical and operational capabilities for the safeguarding of cultural heritage at risk of catastrophe at all territorial levels. The project was carried out from January 2019 to December 2021 by the Italian Department of Civil Protection (Italy), leader of the Implementation Consortium that brought together the experience and competences of the Ministère de l'Intérieur - Direction Générale de la Sécurité Civile et de la Gestion des Crises (France), the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Junta de Castilla y León (Spain), the Ministry of the Interior-Disaster and Emergency Management Authority - AFAD (Turkey), the International Study Center of Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Assets (ICCROM) and the Fondazione Hallgarten - Franchetti Centro Studi Villa Montesca (VM). Throughout the 36 months of activities, the partners of the PROCULTHER consortium, with the participation of the UNESCO Regional Office for Science and Culture in Europe, worked proactively in a process in which cultural heritage actors participated and disaster risk management from the Member States of the European Union and the UCPM participating States, as well as experts from international organizations active in the fields of cultural heritage and disaster risk management. This consultative process has allowed, among other actions, to identify the "Key elements of a European methodology to address the protection of cultural heritage during emergencies" and the elaboration of the minimum requirements for a response capacity promoted by the UCPM capable of intervening and support national response actions around the world for the protection of cultural heritage at risk. With the closure of PROCULTHER, the work of the project partners is not over: from January 2022 to June 2023, they will be dedicated to the PROCULTHER - NET project, the UPCM initiative co-financed by DG ECHO that aims to consolidate a thematic community focused on the protection of cultural heritage at risk of disaster within the EU Civil Protection Knowledge Network. The Federal Technical Assistance Agency - THW and the German Archaeological Institute - DAI (Germany), the University of Porto - UPORTO (Portugal) and the Suor Orsola Benincasa University - UNISOB (Italy) will also participate in the PROCULTHER-NET consortium. ​

HYPERION es un proyecto europeo de 4 años de duración cuyo planteamiento parte de la resiliencia como estrategia global que incluye la gestión de riesgos, la protección y la preparación como estrategias complementarias para prevenir los daños a los sitios culturales. Además quiere identificar y alejar las amenazas adicionales y promover la adaptación, la reconstrucción y otras estrategias posteriores a la perturbación para restablecer las condiciones normales en las áreas históricas, así como los enfoques estratégicos a largo plazo para adaptarse al cambio climático y para manejar las herramientas políticas para la resiliencia económica.

ARCH is an EU-funded research project that aims to better preserve cultural heritage areas from dangers and risks. The ARCH team, together with the cities of Bratislava, Camerino, Hamburg and Valencia, will co-create tools that will help cities save cultural heritage from the effects of climate change.

The impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Cities will face frequent extreme events in the future and the risk that climate change poses to cultural heritage and historic urban centers will also increase.

ARCH will develop a disaster risk management framework to assess and improve the resilience of historic sites to climate change and natural hazards. Tools and methodologies will be designed for local authorities and professionals, the urban population and national and international communities of experts. The project will present various models, methods, tools and data sets to support decision making. ARCH's interdisciplinary team of experts includes four European municipalities; Bratislava, Camerino, Hamburg and Valencia; research scientists, the ICLEI city network and the DIN standardization organization.

ARCH will last for 39 months, from June 1, 2019 to August 30, 2022.

Monument Monitor is an innovative Scottish citizen science project that uses your photographs of heritage sites to help monitor and conserve their condition. We have over 300 properties under our care and although our conservation teams carry out routine maintenance visits, we cannot be in all of them at once. However, historic properties are popular tourist attractions and visitors often take and share photos of their visit. This is where Monument Monitor comes in. In several places around the country we have posted signs asking visitors to send their photos so our team can monitor them remotely.

HERACLES aims to design, validate and promote response systems/solutions for the effective resilience of CH against the effects of climate change, considering as a mandatory premise a holistic and multidisciplinary approach through the participation of different experts (end users, industry /SMEs, scientists, conservators/restorers and social experts, decision makers and politicians). This will be carried out operationally:

With the development of a system that exploits an ICT platform capable of collecting and integrating information from multiple sources in order to effectively provide complete and up-to-date knowledge of the situation and support decision making for innovative measures that improve the resilience of the CH , including new solutions for maintenance and conservation.
The effectiveness of HERACLES will be guaranteed by the design and validation of manageable methodologies also for the definition of operational procedures and guidelines for risk mitigation and management.
The strength of HERACLES solutions is their flexibility in evaluating a large amount of different information that can be modified and adapted to the specific needs of CH assets, thus ensuring general applicability.

End users, who actively participate in project activities, will play a key role.

Website of the National Emergency Plan and Risk Management in Cultural Heritage