Climate Change, Climate Action and Cultural Heritage Collections in Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material has published a range of resources that promote environmentally aware collection care and management practices including climate-specific Environmental Guidelines, the Sustainable Collections wiki and the Climate Adaptation resource. The Climate Adaptation resource provides access to 180 maps illustrating potential future climate scenarios for Australia in 2030 and 2090, using the two Representative Concentration Pathways RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. These maps were produced as part of research undertaken in 2019–2020 by Pagliarino and Meredith and supplement those published in volume 41 (issue 1) of the AICCM Bulletin. The release of updated climate change projections in the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis – precipitated a review of the Climate Adaptation resource to confirm the continued veracity of the maps. This paper provides the results of that assessment, which confirmed the resource’s ongoing accuracy and currency. In addition, the paper includes discussion of the new IPCC future climate scenarios of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, which supersede RCP, and a summary of the state of the climate in Australia with warming, humidity, fire, weather and sea level rise investigated in more detail.