The Pocantico Statement on Climate Impacts and Cultural Heritage
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2015-10-21

Tom Dawson
UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

In February 2015, representatives of over twenty US and international organisations met to consider strategies for preserving and continuing cultural heritage in a changing climate. The meeting was organised by the Society for American Archaeology, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the J. M. Kaplan Fund. The group gathered at the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund - near New York, and at the end of three days of discussion, the
participants put their names to the ‘Pocantico Statement on Climate Impacts and Cultural Heritage’.

Key to the discussion was the recognition of the crucial role that communities have in preserving threatened heritage. The resulting Call to Action invited individuals, organisations and agencies to collaborate in a number of ways, calling on ‘global individuals and institutions to collaborate with existing communities to maintain and preserve cultural heritage through a number of community empowerment projects. These projects will be models for how communities can successfully maintain their cultural heritage in the face of changing climate risks’.

The first pledge of the statement notes that signatories will “help empower and support local, descendant, and traditional communities to maintain and preserve what they value, including intangible heritage and subsistence lifeways”

This paper will describe more fully the Pocantico statement, aiming to publicise the call for action and encouraging heritage
professionals to promote community action at sites threatened by climate change.