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Coastal areas across Europe are at risk – facing climate hazards like floods and heat waves, as well as issues with air pollution. The RescueME ATLAS of European coastal heritage landscape typologies and climate change impacts is a brand-new tool that characterizes and highlights these risks to coastal communities and landscapes across Europe. A powerful tool for decision-making, the interactive mapping features of the ATLAS give communities a better idea of the risks their coastlines face and of other areas adapting to similar issues.  

In the ATLAS, different coastal areas are grouped together into typologies based on similarities in terms of natural, built, human, financial, and social capital at the level of NUTS3 regions. By outlining these typologies, the ATLAS ensures that areas that share certain characteristics can learn from one another as they face similar challenges. For example, the built capital typologies are based on factors like highly built-up areas, or building age; meanwhile, natural capital typologies take into account metrics like presence of protected areas or flood controls. ATLAS users can browse these different typologies, comparing their region to others to get a better grasp of the context for a given coastal area. This comparison helps clarify what underlying conditions might make a region more or less resilient to climate hazards, and what other places might be in the same situation. 

The ATLAS also displays a risk assessment for 513 coastal NUTS3 regions, from climate hazards like pluvial floods, river floods, coastal floods, landslides, droughts, wildfires, and heatwaves – as well as risks posed by poor air quality. Using different climate projections, the map can display different scenarios for each of these risks, which can inform decision-makers of the level of risk to their coastal landscapes.  

Though each landscape will require its own tailored approach to climate adaptation, there are some underlying currents that resonate for most of the coastal landscapes across Europe. Policy recommendations based on the findings displayed in the ATLAS include improved data collection on losses and damages experienced by cultural landscapes, more widespread awareness-raising on the benefits of investing in cultural landscapes and heritage, as well as more adaptive governance approaches. The ATLAS provides clarity about climate risks at a broader scale, and informs the ways that regions boost their resilience. 

The RescueME ATLAS of European coastal heritage landscape typologies and climate change impacts makes the case for enhanced protection of cultural landscapes, displaying different typologies of coastal regions and their climate risks. This new tool is a valuable asset in the protection of cultural landscapes and the journey toward enhanced resilience.