Modelling sustainable decisions for low carbon, climate resilient historic places

This project will commission the Kassandra project for a pilot project to develop models and decision tools for the management of low carbon, climate resilient development for a historic place in England. The Kassandra team has developed an internationally renowned integrated decision support tool for use in highly sensitive world heritage sites. It creates a digital twin of a place and uses that to test different scenarios for climate change related challenges and can test different decisions for resilience, carbon reduction, cost and other user defined benefits.

Applying this in England will enable Historic England to achieve a number of important objectives: • To provide an important visual demonstration of the interconnectedness of carbon reduction, energy efficiency and climate resilience measures, and the benefit of heritage aware decisions for achieving all three • To allow users to explore and illustrate the risks of 'maladaptation' for carbon reduction measures • It would help support Local Authorities in making sustainable decisions about historic places and HAZ • It would position Historic England as a world leader in innovation and use of digital approaches to future heritage challenges • To provide proof of concept for future IRO research grants • To engage constructively with the geospatial commission and public data

If this project is successful in demonstrating that such a model/tool is able to help the 'test' site / organisation make resilient climate decisions, there may be scope to carry out a similar, larger scale project in future.

Depending on funding, we may be able to apply for future IRO research grants for such a project. If money was available through Historic England budgets, we would carry out a standard competitive tender process using the existing project as a proof of concept to build the specification requirement.