Panel: Under the Weather: Strategies for Planning and Response to Climate Change for Heritage Organizations

Abstract

Climate change poses significant short and long term threats to the operations and stability of archival institutions and collections across space and time. In the short term, changing weather and disasters may mean more frequent or severe wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. In the long term, archives may be caught up in larger community conversations around inland migration or relocation as coastal locations are threatened by sea-level rise. The impacts of climate change on archives reverberate at the local, regional, national, and global scales. This seminar will explore the ways in which archivists are building local disaster preparation networks incorporating archives and the broader cultural heritage community, how developing a statewide emergency response network informs preparation for the future, and how national data on archives can give us a glimpse into the large-scale risks we face.