Introduction

Heritage – people’s profound and deeply ingrained relations with their tangible and intangible past and future – is at the forefront of this research programme. Our focus is on coastal Bénin, West Africa, where we will examine how heritage can play a meaningful role in building future resilience to climate change, given its capacity to cohere communities through social responsibility. The West African coastal zone, the interface between ocean, lagoons and rivers, has a rich cultural and natural heritage, a result of complex interactions over centuries. It is home to fragile ecosystems, protected environments, endangered species, heritage sites and hidden archaeology of local and international significance.

Our objective is to improve resilience to evolving climate and environmental hazards in coastal Bénin through increased engagement with, and management of, heritage. Heritage is integral to identity, belonging and all ways of living, and serves as an essential component of wellbeing. Cultural heritage can strengthen adaptive capacity and resilience, by bringing people together, creating inclusive pathways to adaptation. Heritage conservation also teaches us that losses and damages cannot be entirely prevented, and that decisions about what to keep and what to let go are fundamental to maintaining values for future generations – even when what is valued is gone.

CoHeRe adds an important conversation to the CLARE portfolio. It introduces the relevance of heritage to the climate change-adaptation debate. It builds on existing heritage lessons for climate change adaptation (https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00210-z), including equitable participation of diverse groups in decision-making processes, and it recognises, through heritage practice, that co-production is essential for resilient adaptation pathways.

Context

A recent White Paper commissioned by UNESCO, the IPCC and ICOMOS to inform climate change-heritage policy recognises heritage as being integral to all seven sectoral chapters in Working Group II of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. UNESCO, the IPCC and ICOMOS agree that heritage is intrinsic to the long-term resilience of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, oceans and coastal ecosystems, food systems, urban environments, health, wellbeing, economies and livelihoods. Currently Bénin’s oceans and coasts are perceived of as a resource to be fished, mined or developed for economic gain but oceans and coastal ecosystems are significant culturalised places that are valued beyond their economic potential. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals recognise the importance of maintaining healthy oceans and coastal ecosystems. The UN’s Ocean Conference to be held in June 2025 highlights the significance of oceans stating they “form an important part of our natural and cultural heritage and play an essential role in sustainable development”.

Approach and methods

We have two principal objectives; 1) to establish and demonstrate how engagement with tangible and intangible cultural heritage enhances understandings and practices of environmental stewardship, and gives communities agency over change, and 2) to share ways in which these understandings and practices can support communities in vulnerable areas to improve their longer-term resilience to climate change impacts, building coalitions for genuinely inclusive decision-making.

We will test our two strands of thinking through a range of activities that include group activities collecting and collating stories and memories of environmental change, semi-structured interviews with different sectors of society, and activities in schools. We will be exploring cultural understandings of the environment and its risks, valued places, and perceptions of change, including animal and plant distribution. We will conduct archaeological survey of extant tangible heritage and assess its vulnerability to loss and damage.

We will work with heritage users and stakeholders to co-create inclusive pathways to improve resilience by showing how care for heritage is in essence care for community and environment. We hope to build awareness amongst local communities around unrecognised or as yet unidentified heritage uncovered by our surveys. We will compile historical images and create future coastal hazard models, combining discussions and testimonies from local groups, including women’s, youth, and fishermen’s associations. Using images and maps we will explore how Bénin coastal communities conceive of their environment, how it has changed, and what they believe will be a realistic future. Our history and heritage focus groups will discuss and debate the validity of community stewardship of important spaces, places, and traditions in decision-making around change.

Equity and social inclusion

Gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) is at the heart of our project, emphasising the involvement of women and girls and marginalised and vulnerable groups. Our approach to GESI is founded on the observation that different groups perceive, experience and value heritage in different ways, and therefore respond to climate change hazards, impacts and risks differently.

Outputs and outcomes

Our outputs and outcomes will be embedded in monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), which will run alongside our objectives and our activities. This will ensure maximum methodological reflexivity over the life of the project to ensure our outputs are meaningful, relevant and useable and our outcomes are sustainable into the future. Outputs will be embedded in the principles learned from heritage stewardship, foregrounding heritage as integral to effective climate action at local and regional scales. For example, our outputs will allow us to understand how attachment to place impacts adaptation responses differentially, including exploring how people experience and cope with environmental change and how impacts and responses are socially differentiated. Our long-term outcomes include enabling improved communication between different stakeholders with the aim of building trust and empowering marginalised/vulnerable groups and local communities.  This also includes, too, raising the profile of conversations around heritage within the climate adaptation and resilience community, and making the case for the importance of such conversations.

Our outputs and outcomes will be embedded in monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), which will run alongside our objectives and our activities. This will ensure maximum methodological reflexivity over the life of the project to ensure our outputs are meaningful, relevant and useable and our outcomes are sustainable into the future.