Built heritage adaptation and mitigation: The need for a joint effort through heritage science

Built heritage is a key driver in finding sustainable solutions to tackle the climate change crisis. Despite being strongly interconnected, adaptation and mitigation are frequently addressed in isolation. While the preservation of tangible cultural heritage so far has been mostly addressed from the adaptation perspective, historical buildings hold a great potential in mitigation actions through decarbonization and energy efficiency. Joint adaptation and mitigation strategies are crucial to find proper trade-off solutions able to balance both approaches and to enhance their mutual effectiveness. Built heritage can serve a strategic role in joining adaptation and mitigation, constituting a powerful resource to scaling-up green transition and transformative culture-based climate action avoiding maladaptation. Heritage Science, leveraging its inherent trans-disciplinary nature, can critically support this joint approach through cross-fertilisation between humanities and applied sciences, pooling knowledge about best practices, historical materials and construction techniques, fostering progress in digitalization, simulation processes and non-invasive diagnostics for energy and environmental analysis, and informing the design of conservation-compatible and data-driven energy and environmental improvement interventions.