Dr. Cathy Daly:

I co-led the HiClip research project with Dr. Paloma Guzman from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, NIKU. We did it with the Climate Heritage Network, an international group of institutions and organisations concerned with this issue. We looked at climate actions for their inclusion of heritage. We looked at plans from Cameroon, Colombia, New Zealand, Scotland, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Norway at national level. We also looked at California's state plan and the plans from Yarra, a city in Australia, San Antonio in Texas, and Lagos in Nigeria. We analysed those plans for a number of keywords and for the level at which cultural heritage was being integrated. Many plans mentioned it at a strategic level and acknowledged the importance of it, but it did not filter to the implementation level and showed up very little at the monitoring of actions level. There were 17 thematic areas where it came up and in the statement I mentioned, because they are of most interest to this committee, waste reduction, energy mitigation and so on.

We found a dichotomy between the fact it was being recognised by other sectors as being important and it not filtering into actions. We think that is because cultural heritage stakeholders were not being involved in the drawing up of the plan. The other side of the dichotomy is that many cultural heritage people did not identify they had anything to offer in these areas so the intersections were being missed. There is a gap that needs to be bridged but there is a lot of potential.