More effectively addressing fire/disaster challenges to protect our cultural heritage

Disasters are increasing globally. Their adverse impacts on lives and livelihoods, and regional and local economies are felt more and more. Losses to both our tangible and intangible cultural heritage during these disasters are increasing as well. These losses include those to sites, structures and artifacts of cultural significance, as well as impacts to cultural tourism and the financial resources these sites introduce to local communities. While most disasters cannot be prevented, pre-planning measures can significantly help mitigate and effectively reduce their impact. In addition, focusing on disaster risk reduction prior to events, one can help limit spending large sums of money in post-disaster recovery. Therefore, through developing prevention and mitigation measures, emergency response and disaster recovery procedures that are tailored to the individual sites and structures, losses could be further limited. There are numerous mitigation and prevention measures that can be implemented to help limit the loss to our collective cultural heritage. While there are some hazards that it may be challenging to totally mitigate against, there are a significant amount of low cost/high impact prevention and mitigation measures that could be put into place to help reduce these losses. In light of this, this paper will research information related to why hazards develop into disasters, and investigate a detailed, risk-informed approach to better address these hazards particularly related to fire and more effectively and efficiently protecting our cultural heritage.