Preserving legacies: climate risk and resilience in Petra/ صون الموروث المخاطر المناخیة والمَنَعة في البتر

Climate change represents the single greatest threat to heritage worldwide. Effectively responding to this threat is of utmost importance, yet there is a lack of methods to identify risks and capacities to respond to those risks within the heritage sector. Empowering every community to safeguard their cultural and natural heritage against climate change impacts the mission of the Preserving Legacies project. This project equips local leaders with the scientific knowledge and technical training to develop place and people-based climate change adaptation actions. This report presents the results from a climate risk assessment facilitated by the Petra National Trust (PNT) and the Petra Development Tourism Regional Authority (PDTRA) and organised as part of the Preserving Legacies project. It took place between March 2023 and June 2023 and included a series of three community focus groups and a three days workshop which brought together a diverse range of stakeholders to discuss key components of the assessment. This included identifying key values of the heritage site, highlighting social and economic vulnerabilities, gauging adaptive capacities, and assessing climate impacts and risk. The climate risk assessment followed a value-led approach, which began with an assessment of key property values and attributes. While these included heritage values associated with the World Heritage (WH) property, they also identified wider social and economic values important to the community. The following values were identified as being most important to the Petra community: economic values associated with agriculture and tourism, historical and archaeological values, and values associated with the natural landscape. The associated attributes for these values varied and included terraces, fields, the historical monuments and archaeological remains, and the natural flora and fauna of the area. Workshop participants then discussed changing weather and climate based on local experiences and observations, and a report on potential future climate hazards prepared in advance. This identified likely climate change under a range of different emissions scenarios over the next 100 years. It was decided to explore potential hazards until 2060 based on RCP 4.5. This assumes a ‘middle of the road’ situation where social, economic, and technological trends will not change significantly, and is deemed by most scientists to be the most likely future climate. Under this scenario, increased precipitation leading to flash flooding, drought, and increased storminess were identified as the top three future climatic hazards. Following this, the impact of local social and economic factors like development and funding pressures were also discussed, as was the capacity of different parts of the community to adapt to these hazards. Of particular note were the efforts taken by PDTRA to protect the WH property through the restoration of traditional terracing and the use of flood barriers at key water catchment points within the site. These significantly reduced the risk to some key values. The workshop decided that while the potential impact on key values ranged between moderate to extreme for increased precipitation leading to flash floods, low to moderate for drought events, and moderate for increased storminess, the overall risk when adaptive capacity was taken into account was moderate for each of the values with the exception of the archaeological and historical values where the risk was low. This was due to the adaptive efforts of PDTRA and the local community. It therefore summarised that the overall climate risk to Petra by 2060, based on a middle of the road emission scenario, was moderate. The climate risk assessment for Petra illustrates the benefit of a locally-led climate risk assessment methodology which respects plural values, diverse knowledge systems and scientific data, and acknowledges existing adaptation efforts. It demonstrates the benefit of engaging communities in decision making by sharing knowledge and building local capacities. In doing so, it also embeds meaningful and sustainable climate action within the communities who protect and care for our most precious places.