In a recent paper, members of the CoHeRe research team recognised that losses and damages to heritage cannot be entirely prevented. 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. Here, the heritage principle of curating transformation offers lessons for climate change adaptation through pragmatic and participatory management of losses and damages, offering people agency over what is lost.

CoHeRe develops these ideas further in the case of coastal Bénin, which lies at the forefront of climate change. We highlight the potential of ‘memoryscapes’ for sustainable climate change adaptation. We draw here on the knowledge that tangible remains can be leveraged to create mnemonics that can be used in the construction of memories that have spatial and temporal realities; things around us that we value can be deployed to imagine and recreate the past as a spatial reality. This is what we term memoryscapes.

Museums offer one manifestation of this, but traditional museum displays often lack a tactile element to this. The act of touching creates a thread between object and person, a thread based in the past and the future as much as the present. Drawing on this knowledge, we facilitate decision making about what to keep and what to let go, a process fundamental to transgenerational justice.