Advancing Resilience of Historic Areas against Climate-related and other Hazards (ARCH)

The ARCH project aims to enhance the resilience of areas of cultural and historic value against climatic hazards and other natural hazards by providing better information to decision-makers. ARCH combines disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, and heritage management in an overall disaster risk management process. This is supported by a suite of tools: information management systems provide easy access to geo-referenced information; a decision support system supports impact and consequence analyses under different scenarios; an inventory of resilience measures allows identification of resilience enhancing measures; and a strategic resilience self-assessment allows identifying weak spots in resilience strategies and formulating action plans.

ARCH’s solutions are intended to be used by actors at city and historic area level responsible for heritage management, resilience, climate change adaptation, sustainability, and disaster risk management. To ensure direct applicability of all solutions, ARCH's team includes four European municipalities: Bratislava, Camerino, Hamburg, and Valencia. All solutions are developed together with these municipalities in a co-creation approach. In addition, a Mutual Learning Framework widens the practitioner network to 12 additional European municipalities, ensuring widespread replicability of the project results.

ECCA 2021 - Climate Adaptation solutions video - ARCH