Reflections on 2025 and the Road Ahead

As we look back on 2025, we’re struck by how much this year crystalized what’s possible when climate action is rooted in culture, community, and care. It was a landmark year not only for Preserving Legacies, but for the heritage community as a whole. 

2025: A Year of Growth & Recognition

For the first time since our beginnings in 2022, we had heritage places and practices represented in every phase of our program—foundation, activation, adaptation, and amplification. We influenced global climate policy, elevated the importance of plural knowledge approaches to adaptation, and increased climate heritage literacy across continents. Together, we’ve built momentum for a truly global movement of heritage custodians that are strengthening community resilience by creating a future for our past.

Foundation

We welcomed 12 new heritage places and practices and 26 custodians into the first year of our program. Through our hands-on virtual education program, custodians strengthened their climate heritage literacy and built relationships that only deepened when they came together in-person to experience a climate risk assessment workshop firsthand. 

Activation

From downscaling climate data to facilitating engagements with stakeholders and rightsholders, we supported nine heritage places and practices through their climate risk assessment process. Whether in the mountains of Bhutan or along the coastline of Kerkennah Island, our custodians wove together scientific, Indigenous, and local knowledge to co-create adaptation plans that will move into action in the year ahead. 

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Adaptation

Six of our heritage places and practices put the finishing touches on their climate risk assessments, with Sceilg Mhichil publishing theirs last month and the rest publishing in the new year. To help ensure they can realize their adaptation plans, we created bespoke programming to enhance their policy, communications, and fundraising skills. As they begin implementing their action plans in 2026, they remind us that community resilience is a relationship—one built through shared learning, trust, and collective action.

Amplification

We remain deeply inspired by our inaugural sites—Petra and Payo'n Binoltan - Ifugao Rice Terraces—whose work demonstrates the importance of listening to our past to build resilience for our future. Taher Falahat continues to assess, document, map, and name Petra’s ancient Nabatean terraces, laying the groundwork for future conservation and adaptation actions that protect both their structural integrity and historical significance. And Marlon M. Martin

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Elevating Heritage on the Global Stage

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As an organization, we are proud to have received the Global Center on Adaptation’s Local Adaptation Champions Award for Citizen Science, recognizing the power of combining lived experience with scientific knowledge. Members of our team were also recognized in their own right: Dr. Salma Sabour was selected as a Lead Author for the IPCC’s Africa Chapter (AR7) and Andrew Potts received WMF’s 2025 Watch Award. 

Beyond these honors, our team engaged in more than a dozen international conferences and events, helping to establish cultural heritage and plural knowledge systems as central pillars in climate adaptation discussions. And through our Heritage Adapts to Climate Alliance (HACA), we advanced the integration of heritage in global climate adaptation policy, which culminated at COP30, where our upcoming Heritage Adapts! 3000 x 2030 campaign was selected as one of 100 official “Plans to Accelerate Solutions.” This recognition underscores the growing acknowledgment that culture and heritage are not afterthoughts in climate action—they’re catalysts.

2026: Our Year for Scaling Impact

While we’re proud of our progress, we also recognize the scale of the challenge before us. Reaching a handful of heritage places or practices each year is not enough—we must aim for thousands. That’s why 2026 will be our year for scaling impact: expanding the reach of our programs, launching the Heritage Adapts! 3000 x 2030 Campaign and Community of Action, and developing new pathways for communities worldwide to safeguard their heritage and strengthen local resilience.

To all our custodians, partners, supporters, and friends—thank you for building this movement with us. Together, we’re proving that heritage is not only what connects us to our past, but also what guides us toward a thriving future for all.