## 3 Results
### Results of the Literature Assessment  
3.1.1. Overview of the Types of Damages Considered: Unbalanced Concentration on Specific Types of Hazards and Regionalsisms  
The analysis of the indexed literature of academic studies on hazards affecting cultural heritage sites worldwide and performed between 2000 and 2021 by European institutions using remote sensing techniques revealed some important trends. Figure 3a suggests that, from a quantitative point of view, the temporal evolution of the studies published over the last 20 years can be divided into four main phases. During the first six years of the new millennium (2000-2006), the application of remote sensing technologies for monitoring hazards to cultural heritage is almost absent in the scientific research catalogs that were searched. Then, a growing interest emerged starting in 2007 (the second phase), with an average of two studies per year. From 2012 to 2016 (the third phase), the number of publications on this topic underwent a sharp increase, reaching an average of 15 publications per year. Then, in 2017, the scientific production in this field entered a fourth phase, where the number of studies focusing on global damage to cultural heritage reached 40 per year, thus doubling the 2012-2016 trend. However, when looking at the types of hazards considered in the published studies, we observe that the substantial increase in scientific literature is associated with an uneven distribution, with most of the publications focusing on only some hazards (Figure 3b). Indeed, while one-third of the 295 publications considered in this paper (i.e., 98, accounting for 32.1%) tackled multiple hazards (i.e., often up to 10-15), those focusing on a single type chose only a selected number of them. For example, \"Sudden ecological and geological events\", namely earthquakes, landslides, and floods, represent the most investigated hazards by single-topic publications (58, 20.1%). \"Other human activities\" (37, 12.5%), which  
Figure 3: (**a,b**) Distribution of studies between 2000 and 2022 ((**a**), **left**) and percentage of the types of hazards most analyzed by the indexed literature, as defined according to UNESCO’s official terminology [24]. Please note that all percentages are intentionally rounded to the unit, without decimals. The total sum is 100%. is a broad and diverse category including conflict, looting, and vandalism, together with \"Management activities\" (34, 12.2%), follow quite closely. In this context, it is noteworthy that certain UNESCO factors such as \"Climate change\", \"Pollution\", and \"Physical resource extraction\", which are currently on top of the agenda in other research sectors and beyond (i.e., the UN SDGs), found little space in the current debate around the main hazards affecting cultural heritage. The tendency of scientific research to focus on a few hazard types is also confirmed by analyzing the temporal trend of publications. Since the early 2000s, publications mostly focused on \"Sudden ecological and geological events\", \"Management activities\", and \"Other human activities\". Only climate change registered a substantial increase since 2017, becoming the fourth macro-factor most investigated in the scientific literature. The geographical location of the case studies from the 295 papers selected showed significant patterns (Figure 4). The findings show that, while around 21% (64) of the case studies took into consideration one or two countries, almost 50% (147) of case studies considered around nine (9) of them (Figure 5). These mostly include European countries such as Italy (37, 12.5%), Cyprus (28, 9.4%), Russia (8, 2.7%), Greece (9, 3%), and the UK (9, 3%), although a few extra-European countries also received extensive attention from EU scholars, as in the case of Peru (21, 7.1%), Egypt (15, 5%), Iraq (10, 3.3%), and Syria (10, 3.3%).