Meet Our Global Team
Preserving Legacies is powered by a growing team of diverse climate heritage champions. Get to know the thought leaders, scientists, storytellers, site custodians, and community advocates on a mission to safeguard every site against current and future climate impacts.
Leadership Team
Managed by National Geographic Explorer Dr. Victoria Herrmann, this ambitious project requires a global organization and dedicated team to plan, develop, execute, and evaluate all project activities. Meet them below.
Site Custodians
The site custodians of Preserving Legacies are the heart of this project. Each site in Preserving Legacies is represented by two site custodians, who come from community organizations, management authorities, and nonprofits to learn about climate heritage and act at their sites.
Scientific Steering Committee
The Scientific Steering Committee serves as an advisory board and community of champions in service of this mission. Members bring valuable specialized information, experience, skills, and geographic reach of ICOMOS National Committees so that the impact of Preserving Legacies can reach further.
Storytellers
This project team deeply believes that artists have a unique and vital role to play in responding to climate change, and believes in the power of creative communication in raising awareness of climate change impacts. Through their work, artists can foster personal and emotional connection to the issue, encourage empathy and collaboration, imagine new futures, and in so doing help effect positive change.
Preserving Legacies provides meaningful support to local artists to take part in this project, document the process of protecting cultural heritage sites from climate change impacts, foster connections between project members and the artist, and include artist in a global community of practice on climate heritage with other artists, heritage professionals, scientists, educators, and advocates tackling climate change.
The work created through this residency will allow communities across the world to see and experience the project’s process, work, and mission to protect heritage sites from climate change impacts. Artists will create site-inspired artwork and document the process of the project.
Check back for updates from our artists-in-residence here.
Our partners
Preserving Legacies is made possible by our partners, who share our vision to enable cultural heritage sites big and small to access the tools needed to address the existential threat of climate change. By partnering with leading organizations in cultural heritage, climate change, and community empowerment, we can transform conservation as a field to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world.
ICOMOS works for the conservation and protection of cultural heritage places. It is the only global non-government organisation of this kind, which is dedicated to promoting the application of theory, methodology, and scientific techniques to the conservation of the architectural and archaeological heritage. It is a global network of experts that benefits from the interdisciplinary exchange of its members, among which are architects, historians, archaeologists, art historians, geographers, anthropologists, engineers and town planners. ICOMOS members contribute to improving the preservation of heritage, the standards and the techniques for each type of cultural heritage property: buildings, historic cities, cultural landscapes and archaeological sites. ICOMOS is the primary partner and fiscal sponsor of the Preserving Legacies project and our team are members of different national committees including France, USA, Ireland and Tunisia.
The Climate Heritage Network (CHN) is a voluntary, mutual support network of government agencies, NGOs, universities, businesses, and other organizations committed to tackling climate change and achieving the ambitions of the Paris Agreement.
Mobilized in 2018 during the Global Climate Action Summit and launched in 2019, the Climate Heritage Network works to re-orient climate policy, planning, and action at all levels to account for dimensions of culture - from arts to heritage.
The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization that uses the power of science, exploration, education and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world.