Venice advances cultural heritage resilience
One of the world’s most iconic cities in terms of its vast cultural heritage has convened multiple urban partners and sectors to assess capacities and gaps in its resilience to disasters. Making Cities Resilient 2030 (MCR2030) Resilience Hub, Venice used UNDRR’s Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities: Cultural Heritage addendum to identify pathways to advance its protection.
In its first application in the Europe and Central Asia region, 18 representatives from the municipality, the Ministry of Culture, academia, private foundations, and other cultural heritage institutes in Venice, came together to delve deeper into key aspects of protecting the city’s cultural heritage from escalating disaster risk.
The overall assessment received high scores. However, various representatives highlighted the need for a more advanced and comprehensive strategy on cultural heritage that can facilitate a more structured exchange of data and integrate existing plans and strategies within the municipality. The workshop fostered good discussion between various stakeholder representatives and opened opportunities to share experiences and perspectives with other cities on how to best manage cultural heritage.
Pierpaolo Campostrini, Director General of the Consortium for Coordination of Research activities concerning the Venice Lagoon system (CORILA), said, “Venice has rich experience in managing cultural heritage, which recently gained a big success in flooding risk protection. We are pleased to assess our capacity to address disaster risks in cultural heritage protection through this workshop with UNDRR, using the MCR2030 tool. We aim to share our experience and knowledge with other cities as an MCR2030 Resilience Hub.”
Urbano Fra Paleo, Professor of the University of Extremadura and UNDRR E-STAG member, remarked that “The MCR2030’s scorecards are designed for cities to assess their resilience based on the Ten Essentials against the Sendai Framework. The workshop provided a good opportunity for cities to discuss this important issue of incorporating DRR into cultural heritage protection. Based on this initial assessment and discussion, we will be able to identify lessons learned and recommendations in partnership with UNDRR.”
The Venice Sustainability Foundation, which co-organized the workshop with UNDRR’s Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia, translated the Scorecard into Italian to facilitate the dialogue and assessment. A follow-up consultation will be conducted in the coming months to share the lessons learned with other cities.
MCR2030 is a United Nations-led global partnership that has mobilized 1,740 cities in 86 countries and territories covering a combined population of 556 million. Venice is one of 32 MCR2030 Resilience Hubs that have been recognized for their track record in disaster risk reduction and their commitment to support other cities to scale up their ambitions and actions.