Our research team is global but to contact the team please email Dr Kate Donovan at the University of Edinburgh.
UK based research team members include:
Dr Kate Donovan (Principle Investigator for the CRITICAL projects) email: kate.donovan@ed.ac.uk
Dr Rowan Jackson | The University of Edinburgh
This section is taken from the CRITICAL project policy brief. The team collaborated over 18 months to raise the voice of the most vulnerable and marginalised, we used heritage as our tool for dialogue around climate change adaptation and we learnt so much about heritage and the opportunities that can be found at a local level to overcome the climate crisis. We hope that you leave this course we a positive renewed energy to tackle climate change using your heritage toolkit. Engage, discuss and share your cultural heritage for the good of our society. The short video below provides some key take-home messages whilst you can read our summary and recommendations for policy makers, researchers and practitioners below.
“Heritage is much more than the preservation of old buildings and sites. What we eat, how we dance, how we mourn the dead, what we sing and how we love, are practices that can sustain all sorts of onslaughts. How this is represented and who represents becomes key in any conversation after catastrophe.”
-Dominque Niemand, Research Associate, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
There can be no sustainable development without Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) including Climate Change Adaptation (CCA). Yet these rely on a foundation of understanding risk in all its complexity. Heritage is a missing component of conventional risk approaches, despite its ability to shape our identity, deliver capacities, and expose vulnerabilities. The CRITCAL project aimed to better understand the role of heritage within risk assessment through the investigation of three case study sites and developing a community of practice across three Low-Middle Income Countries (LMICs). The case study sites identified were across three scales: the small-scale settlement of Elandskloof in South Africa; the city region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia and a national approach across Sri Lanka. Exploring these three scales we were able to capture a narrative-based risk assessment for heritage and found that heritage opens avenues for dialogue on livelihoods, gender, local level capacity and vulnerability.
At a national scale, Dr Karunarthna carried out multiple interviews and facilitated two workshops in rural settlements across Sri Lanka. Furthermore, her work included a review of historical literature exploring the role of women in traditional rural practices. At a city-scale, Dr Retnowati and Ms Anantasari carried out a series of interviews with key stakeholders along the River Code in Yogyakarta region. In South Africa, Prof O’Connell and Ms Niemand led two workshops, a household survey and a series of interviews in Elandskloof. In addition, a review of climate data for each site and a systematic synthesis of literature related to heritage, risk and value was undertaken (Crowley et al 2022).
“Cultural memories can create an intellectual platform to brainstorm potential use of the heritage practices for a sustainable future”
-Dr Dulma Karunarathna, University of Victoria, Canada.
Local risk narratives have challenged conventional top-down approach to understanding the threats to heritage from climate change. We find that our case studies identified how local community value place, and how heritage can be a mechanism for engagement with adaptation. Conventional risk assessments for heritage sites rarely take into account local level values and are currently largely lacking in LMICs (Crowley et al 2022). Heritage is considered a resource in the three case sites. In Yogyakarta, the river is a heritage asset and forms a cultural axis through the city. In Elandskloof, a narrative of loss in terms of intergenerational knowledge due to forced removal and climate change were uncovered. The capacity of women and their traditional environmental knowledge for climate adaptation was captured across Sri Lanka. The research findings were discussed at a final stakeholder workshop in March 2022 resulting in the identification of three areas of critical thinking:
The research team reflected on their cross-disciplinary work during this project at a time of global pandemic. A learning approach was central to this project and the interdisciplinary team has captured and shared a diversity of voice on heritage through a freely available e-Learning course, a series of videos as well as ArcGIS story maps.
“Disasters related to climate change and environmental damage have put cultural traditions and cultural landscapes at unprecedented risk. The impact of climate change on heritage requires improvements in the planning and management.”
– Dr Arry Retnowati, Centre of Excellence in Technological Innovation for Disaster Mitigation (GAMA-InaTEK), Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
There are three core recommendations that speak across different audiences:
For funders and policy makers at an international scale:
For country-level policy makers:
For researchers and civil society:
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank and acknowledge our funders the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and UK Department for Digital, Cultural, Media and Sport (Award ref: AH/V006371/1). We would also like to thank our expert advisory panel for their invaluable time and support throughout this project in particular Professor Andrew Dugmore and Dr Sukanya Krishnamurthy at the University of Edinburgh, Professor David Harvey and Professor Nick Shepard at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Terry Cannon at the Institute for Development Studies, UK.
We would also like to thank those who have contributed through reviews, video contributions and attendance at stakeholder workshops.
Overall, we would like to acknowledge and thank the people who have contributed their time and knowledge to this project from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and South Africa.
In this section you will hear from two leading experts in cultural heritage and disasters.
Cultural heritage and climate change relations: Loss, Adaptation and Creativity
Professor David C. Harvey provides a brief overview of cultural heritage and climate change relations.
Culture and risk perception: The hidden significance of culture in development, climate change and disasters
How we perceive cultural heritage is considered to be situated within a risk context (Harrison, 2013). From a Western perspective, heritage is often framed through a preservationist lens as something to be protected from threats rather than a dynamic and multifaceted resource that delivers resilience. To this end, heritage should not be viewed simply as a stable material to be preserved for the future, but as a shifting interaction between past, present and future.
There has been some progress on an international scale to incorporate heritage within risk thinking. For example, The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030) refers to cultural heritage in terms of ensuring a better understanding of the impacts on heritage and of good governance for the protection of heritage:
‘To systematically evaluate, record, share and publicly account for disaster losses and understand the economic, social, health, education, environmental and cultural heritage impacts, as appropriate, in the context of event-specific hazard-exposure and vulnerability information; (UNDRR, 2015 p15)
To protect or support the protection of cultural and collecting institutions and other sites of historical, cultural heritage and religious interest;’ (UNDRR, 2015 p19)
To meet the goals of such international agreements, risk assessment methods and tools are developed, tested and improved. The result is a potential increase in accessibility to risk tools and data for local to national government and other key stakeholders. However, comprehensive and systematic use of holistic risk assessments for sustainable development through adaptation is still limited.
The majority of risk assessment tools and methods that incorporate heritage are developed on a project-by-project basis, for specific contexts. They rarely have a long life span.
Watch this video below to learn more about the interconnection between heritage and disasters.
Further reading & resources
Learn more about the UNDRR International framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (also known as the Sendai Framework)
David Harvey’s book The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation and Creativity
Cultural heritage shapes our values and beliefs; it is a reflection of who we are and drives our motivations and actions. How we respond to climate change is therefore influenced by our cultural heritage. This may be directly through what we choose to believe and how we may or may not take action to reduce our impact on the planet. Or it may also be a positive tool that can lead to a better understanding of climate change and the actions we can take to protect ourselves, our communities and our shared future.
Climate change is not new. Our planet has warmed and cooled many times over thousands of years. However, anthropogenic (human induced) climate change (which we are experiencing now) is new because it is extremely rapid and driven by us pumping vast amounts of Green House Gases into the atmosphere. Never before has the planet experienced such a rapid change in temperature in such a short amount of time.
Cultural heritage can therefore provide a record of the nature and the effects of past climate change and other disasters, and our responses to them. It gives a valuable perspective on how climate change and other disasters have been experienced in the past by different members of society. It can provide an essential human dimension to our understanding of climate change that can complement data from the physical sciences. That can help us to understand the strengths and limitations of different responses to disaster and hopefully help us become more resilient in the future.
Cultural heritage is itself vulnerable to climate change and other hazards. Both tangible (e.g. buildings, paintings, or materials) and intangible (e.g. beliefs, practices and knowledge) heritage can be exposed to different threats and it can be lost. How we value our heritage and therefore protect or accept its loss. But these decisions should be made in collaboration with the people who live, embody and interact with that heritage.
Geologists say that ‘the past is key to our future’, well, cultural heritage represents our past and our future and therefore is a critical element of how we understand the world and our impacts on it.
Watch this short video explaining the connection between cultural heritage and climate change.
Before we get into more detail about climate change and cultural heritage, the short video below shares a diverse range of perspectives on heritage. We invite you to reflect on what heritage means to you.
Heritage and how it is valued is personal to each one of us, it shapes our thinking and influences our actions. It is our toolkit for survival during the current climate emergency.
Further readings & resources
What’s the challenge?
There can be no sustainable development without Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) including Climate Change Adaptation (CCA). These rely on risk assessment that encompass understanding the hazard, exposure, vulnerabilities as well as capacities in all their complexities. Cultural heritage shapes our society and influences our actions before, during and after disasters, yet as Taschakert et al (2017:6) argue “assessments of disaster impacts largely ignores such experiences and understandings”. Incorporating heritage into risk informed decision making is therefore vital for building and maintaining resilience.
The video below covers recent efforts to build capacities in face of climate risk at the national and international level. In particular, the video highlights the importance of research and cooperation in the management of climate risk in a cultural heritage context.
The importance of risk assessment
Many cultural heritage sites are at risk of natural hazards and climate-change related such as, floods, landslides, droughts, wildfire, drought, extreme weather, and sea level rise among others. The impacts of natural hazards such as floods compounded with the uncertainty of climate change are difficult to identify and measure. To manage and reduce a specific risk, an assessment is necessary. Risk assessment is the judgement to combine present observation with past experiences to allow the prediction of future events and guide future actions. Since climate change is expected to intensify existing risk level, risk assessment should constitute the starting point for managing and eventually reducing future risks on cultural heritage.
The CRITICAL research team reviewed peer-reviewed academic papers published between 2007-2021 relating to risk assessment tools or frameworks and cultural heritage. There findings illustrate a serious issue with the incorporation of heritage within risk assessments.
Key messages from this analysis include:
PAR model for heritage risk management
The Pressure and Release (PAR) model in disaster management explained by Terry Cannon. The PAR model seeks to explain how the intersection between the process of generating vulnerability and natural hazards exposures creates and/or exacerbates social vulnerability (Blaikie et al. 1994). The video clip is from a CRITICAL project workshop ( July 2021).
This framework provides a way of understanding that vulnerability is multi-layered. This framework was designed a number of years ago and describes that disasters are social constructs, and require both a natural hazard and also vulnerable people or ecosystems.
Further readings & resources
Blaikie et al, 1994, At Risk, Routledge
In this section we will explore the current climate emergency. We will briefly explain why current climate change is so important and its fundamental drivers.
Our planet is warming at an unprecedented rate, this means that as global temperatures rise our weather and longer term climate patterns are changing at a local and regional level. This has overwhelmingly negative consequences for people and biodiversity around the world. Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a global body of climate change scientists) highlight that we need to take urgent action to reduce the worst possible scenario in the future. This means that we must reduce our Green House Gas emissions across the board from industry, to energy production through to land use and transport. We must also ensure that we take action to reduce the risks we face now and in the future – we call this adaptation. It is important that we consider both mitigation (reducing our emissions) and adaptation together when talking about climate action.
Watch this short video to get a summary of climate change and actions we need to take.
If you are new to climate change, then let’s delve in a little deeper. The following lecture provides an overview of the climate crisis, the reason why we are in a climate crisis and some of the possible things we can do to not only survive but thrive. We cover topics such as adaptation and vulnerability.
Further readings and resources:
Please share your thoughts and experiences in your regional climate change & extreme weather events by leaving comments on this blog post.
As explored in 1.3 What is cultural heritage? Heritage has multiple meanings, ranging from everyday objects and practices to symbolic spaces and rituals. Because these objects, spaces and practices are of value to a given community of interest, we might reason that they should be preserved in an unchanged and unchanging form—especially if they are threatened by the impacts of climate change and globalisation. But this preservationist approach is not a panacea because heritage is valued in different ways by different people over time. This section will expand on the idea of processual cultural heritage as a means of rethinking what is threatened by climate change.
Processual cultural heritage
Processual heritage recognises the multiple interactions of people with heritage objects and practices. This is seen in conservation practice, observing how attempts to stabilise or restore material decay – the practice of preservation – create new environments. This can be understood as new combinations of things used to hold materials together, and new histories – events of change – that recall events that change how the object is understood. In other words, heritage is the process through which ‘things’ become ‘objects of display’ (Harrison, 2013: 69). The process of becoming heritage is a human condition, a social process associated with memory, identity, and perception; it involves re-use, re-working, and re-interpretation (Harvey, 2001).
In the video below, David Harvey explains how we can think of heritage as a process. He explores not only material heritage, such as objects, sites, and landscapes, but also intangible values and power-relations.
Rethinking Cultural Heritage
Mainstream cultural heritage practice has increasingly incorporated the values of local groups in the act of conserving objects and landscapes. The Future of Our Pasts report, commissioned by the International Commission on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), draws attention to the role of cultural heritage, and local stakeholders, in the protection of cultural assets in the context of increased climate risk (ICOMOS, 2019). The report recognises the important role of heritage assets in reducing and compensating for loss and damage, improving adaptation through recognition of cultural limits and capacities, and drawing attention to the vulnerability of cultural heritage that has and will be lost to the impacts of climate change in the 21st century.
Heritage studies in the context of climate risk is therefore a highly interdisciplinary field, requiring the input of climate scientists, archaeologists and anthropologists, historians, museologists, artists, and disaster risk experts to name but a few. To safeguard cultural heritage for present and future generations, cultural resource managers (or heritage practitioners) will require input from each of these fields of research. As previously noted by Rowan Jackson, Hambrecht and Rockman (2017) draw attention to four pillars for addressing climate-related threats: science, mitigation, adaptation, and communication. At the upstream end, academic play a significant role in understanding how climate change will impact sites, landscapes, and communities. Practitioners play a significant role in the co-production of mitigation and adaption strategies together with stakeholder groups, as well as the communication of projected impacts on cultural heritage. A concerted effort to monitor impacts and build capacity is necessary to achieving resilient cultural heritage (Fatorić and Seekamp, 2017).
In the video below, Rowan Jackson asks: how we should conceptualise heritage risk?
Further readings & resources
The importance of diversity of voice
In order to move away from or critically reflect on a western discourse on heritage management and risk assessment you need to listen to a range of voices from different geographies.
The CRITCAL project aimed to better understand the role of heritage within risk assessment through the investigation of three case study sites. We wanted to develop a community of practice across three Low-Middle Income Countries (LMICs) and the UK. The case study sites worked three scales: the small-scale settlement of Elandskloof in South Africa; a city region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia and a national approach across Sri Lanka. Exploring these three scales we were able to capture a narrative-based risk assessment for heritage and found that heritage opens avenues for dialogue on livelihoods, gender, local level capacity and vulnerability.
The video below outlines the importance of understanding culture at a local level.
Three sites, many voices
This module explores three locations. Through videos and text we ask you to consider these studies and reflect on how heritage is understood in different contexts.
In summary we found that heritage can take many forms, for example in this course we have examples of buildings, landscapes, and customs. Furthermore, we found how heritage is important not just because it is vulnerable to climate change but also because it offers capacity. We invite you to explore the posts in this module and learn more about how heritage can be a tool for climate change adaptation and risk reduction.
Methods
The research teams engaged with local communities and experts to address all three original research questions. Their findings are context specific and include alternative and community led visions of cultural heritage and their interconnections with climate change adaptation and sustainable livelihoods. As well as identifying and trialling innovative participatory methods that can be integrated within a wider holistic risk framework that places cultural assets and practice at the heart of resilience building.
At a national scale, Dr Karunarthna carried out multiple interviews and facilitated workshops in rural settlements across Sri Lanka. Furthermore, her work included a review of historical literature exploring the role of women in traditional rural practices. At a city-scale, Dr Retnowati and Ms Anantasari carried out a series of interviews with key stakeholders along the River Code in Yogyakarta region. In South Africa, Prof O’Connell and Ms Niemand led two workshops, a household survey and a series of interviews in Elandskloof, South Africa. In addition, a review of climate data for each site and a systematic synthesis of literature related to heritage, risk and value was undertaken (Crowley et al 2022).
Research findings in brief
The South Africa team, led by Dr Siona O’Connell and Dominque Niemand, identified the influence loss in terms of indigenous knowledge systems and how food heritage may pave the way to intergenerational knowledge exchange. They also explore how violent and forced removals from the land have led to significant vulnerabilities for communities across South Africa. Section 3.2 outlines the case study findings in detail.
In Indonesia the team, Dr Arry Retnowati and Esti Anantasari identified the importance and cultural value of an urban river system and are expanded their work to explore the wider urban setting of Yogyakarta, and it’s bid to become a city-wide UNESCO World Heritage Site. The river’s cultural narrative is critical in understanding local adaptive capacity and vulnerabilities over time, and how cultural heritage is a dynamic force not just something to be preserved. Section 3.4 outlines the case study findings in detail.
In Sri Lanka, Dr Dulma Karunarathna identified the importance of local knowledge for water resource management and the cultural connections for women and their livelihoods. She has also implemented a series of engagements with communities in Sri Lanka through school-based art competitions as well as community storytelling workshops. Section 3.3 outlines the case study findings.
The narratives emerging from the three sites align with the results of the desk-based literature reviews that have identified the serious lack of understanding and integration of intangible cultural heritage, community level engagement, and cultural value in risk assessments for climate change adaptation and disaster management.
This section provides an outline of each case study site explaining the context, and key findings.
Resources
Read the teams literature review – Crowley et al 2022 Open Access paper
We view heritage as processual and emergent, as opposed to static objects to be only preserved (Harvey and Perry, 2015). Tangible climate change impacts on heritage, such as eroding coastal archaeology, chemical weathering and thawing permafrost/landscape change, have dominated publications (Hollesen et al., 2018; Dawson et al., 2020). Yet impacts on heritage intersects with a far wider range of objects and practices (Sandford 2019; DeSilvey and Harrison, 2020).
Intangible heritage, such as traditional belief systems, are also a resource of environmental knowledge for future adaptation (Adger et al 2012). Archaeologists and heritage experts have benefited from comparing different cultural sites, focusing on the diversity of heritage sites, landscapes and traditions and what can be learned from such examples (Hambrecht and Rockman, 2017).
Sharing knowledge of the range of impacts, threats and opportunities associated with multiple types of heritage in different geographical contexts is important developing effective frameworks for heritage protection and as well as community resilience (Fluck and Wiggins, 2017).
Effective dialogue between heritage experts and community members has been acknowledged as a vital step in understanding the role of heritage for climate change adaptation (Hambrecht and Rockman, 2017; Rockman and Hritz, 2020; Rick and Sandweiss, 2020), and there is potential to learn from the diversity of heritage nationally and internationally (Dawson et al., 2020).
Heritage has been described as “all things to all people”. As we have noted hertiage can be tangible (e.g., buildings, sites, objects) and intangible (e.g., ritual practices, music, belief system). The difficulty tying the concept down makes the scope of heritage hard to define and difficult to contain within one discipline of study.
The disciplines conventionally associated with heritage have focused on the preservation and conservation of historical artefacts, sites, and landscapes. For example, in museums vast resources are dedicated to the conservation of historic artefacts; in national parks resource managers monitor impacts cultural and natural heritage at the landscape scale; and architects and planners’ monitor impacts on buildings and cityscapes.
The extensiveness of heritage assets require the concerted efforts of international organisation like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to evaluate and monitor heritage ranging from internationally recognised—World Heritage—to intangible heritage at the local scale.
In practice, organisations such as the National Park Service of the United States and Historic Environment Scotland are responsible for the protection and management of cultural heritage at the national scale.
Finally, we can think about heritage at the local scale; the scale at which it is lived, valued, imagined, and consumed.
In the video below, researchers involved in the CRITICAL project consider what heritage means to them. Note how heritage varies significantly between members of the project team. This can be explained by different personal experiences, disciplinary training, research cultures, and national ideas of heritage.
Modern heritage studies and World Heritage dates to the aftermath of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1945. Set in the background of destruction across Europe and Southeast Asia, UNESCO was established with the aim of promoting peace, intercultural understanding, and humanitarianism through international cooperation in education, sciences, art, and culture.
The promotion of culture and the arts was a reaction to the destruction caused by the conflict, leading to the adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972 (‘Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage’).
This convention sought to protect and manage listed sites with technical and management expertise from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN, est. 1948), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS, est. 1965), and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICROM, est. 1956).
The influence of the World Heritage Convention has been palpable – especially in Western Europe and North America – with a significant ‘boom’ since the 1970s. Since the 1960s and 1970s in Britain, with membership of heritage organisations such as the National Trust and attendance figures at the British Museum increasing exponentially—with similar attendance figures associated with National Parks and Smithsonian Museums in the United States.
Public attendance of cultural history museums and heritage sites remain consistently popular, with museums and cultural heritage sites topping most national attendance registers (see for example Association for Scottish Visitor Attractions for data).
In the last 10 years, increased attention has been drawn to the impacts of climate change on cultural and natural heritage. This has most recently been highlighted in the Future of Our Past report by ICOMOS (2019) and the acknowledgement of cultural heritage impacts in Working Group Two of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report Six (IPCC, 2022). Links to these resources can be found below.
The video below provides an historical overview and considers the following discussion points:
We encourage you to consider these questions as you watch the video.
How are heritage resources managed? What risks does climate change create for cultural heritage in both its tangible and intangible form? The most recognisable example of heritage management can be found in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972:
Protection and management of World Heritage properties should ensure that their Outstanding Universal Value, including the conditions of integrity and/or authenticity at the time of inscription, are sustained or enhanced over time.
This includes a comprehensive plan for each site on the World Heritage List to monitor, resource and preserve sites—including expert training for site management staff—thus achieving their safeguarding. The Budapest Declaration of 2002 recognised connection between heritage and sustainable development, including the necessary role of local communities in the management of heritage sites and the role of tourism in social and economic development.
Taking this further, the Amsterdam Conference on Linking Universal Values and Local Values recommended consistent local participation to enable the local value of place. This, in turn, recognises the importance of local values in the management of World Heritage Sites in what is termed the “fifth C” of the “Five Cs” strategic objectives from the World Heritage Convention: credibility, conservation, capacity-building, communication, and community.
ICOMOS Futures of Our Past: https://www.icomos.org/en/77-articles-en-francais/59522-icomos-releases-future-of-our-pasts-report-to-increase-engagement-of-cultural-heritage-in-climate-action
IPCC Assessment Report Six: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-ii/
Harrison, R., 2013. Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge.
“Heritage is fluid and complex, it is political in every sense. The work of heritage allows difficult conversations to take place in imaginative ways, allowing for history to be understood as being in the present” -Prof Siona O’Connell, International Co-investigator, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
In South Africa, the scars of inequality and social engineering that characterised the apartheid system persist despite nearly three decades of democracy.
Injustice through forced land ownership changes, brought violent race-based removal of settlements across the Cape Flats. The legacy of historical injustice still affects today as Elandskloof is impoverished in lacking infrastructure, including little formal housing.
The study of vulnerable and forgotten communities – single sites in particular – is therefore utterly crucial. Forgotten communities require context-specific approaches to support them taking into account histories, livelihood portfolios, and likely climate change impact.
Established as a mission station by the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in 1861, families from the surrounding area were attracted to settle by the dream of autonomy and dignity – title to a small plot of land, the right to graze your cattle in the surrounding veld, and a community of faith gathered under the wing of the church.
Elandsklowers harvested buchu (Agathosma betulina), kept vegetable gardens, grazed cattle, and worked as seasonal laborers on the surrounding farms. The betrayal, when it came, was dramatic, unexpected, and intimate. In 1961 the DRC sold the land out from underneath them. Residents who were children at the time tell of going to school in the. morning, and returning to find the bulldozers at work on their homes.
Then, like the estimated 3.5 million people in South Africa who suffered forced removal under apartheid, they drifted into the surrounding towns and the dystopian dormitory settlements of the Cape Flats.
In 1996, Elandskloof hit news headlines as the first successful land claim in a newly democratic South Africa. Seventy-six families returned to Elandskloof.
However, over the coming decades, the contradictions in a deeply flawed restitution process came to the fore: land without the capital to develop it, and a group of claimants many decades removed from a meaningful relationship with the business of rural livelihoods, carrying the scars of the struggle for survival under apartheid. In 2005, the Elandskloof Communal Property Association was placed under administration. Today, Elandskloof is an impoverished rural ghetto without infrastructure, and with little formal housing.
Layered onto these traumatic events as an unanticipated and largely indecipherable process has been the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Southern Africa, and the Western Cape, in particular, has been described as a climate change hot-spot, with evidence of warming above the global average.
The annual average temperature across South Africa in 2019 was around 1.1°C warmer than the average for the period of 1981-2010.
There has also been an increasing trend in extreme temperatures (maximum temperatures) by 0.1-0.3°C a decade across the Western Cape between 1931 and 2020 (South Africa Weather Service, 2020).
There is medium confidence that there has been a long-term decline in soil moisture (increase in aridity) throughout the twenty-first century in west-southern Africa as a result of decreasing precipitation and increased temperatures.
In South Africa the number of droughts have increased by 220% between 1961 and 2016, as a result of anthropogenic forcing (IPCC- AR6).
This study foregrounds the importance of culture as central to understanding ways of being.
Cultural scholars and practitioners respond and intervene in creative and productive ways to social contexts and social realities, drawing attention to the lived, material, and embodied realities and crises of the contemporary moment. In the global south and Africa, cultural studies that focus on understanding the human and colonial afterlives provide a framework that allows a critical, immediate and urgent analysis of the world. A focus on food heritage in Elandskloof explores the intimately embodied and everyday aspects of some dauntingly high-level concerns – ideas around culture, identity, history, descendancy, and production in the face of climate change.
We are what we eat goes the platitude. Food plays a central role in all our lives, what we grow, eat and share forms a bond to the land and each other. In rural settlements reliant on agriculture food is a central pillar to the community.
Preparing and sharing food is a ritual through which we build and repair relationships, and nurture those that we care for. Food heritage is interesting because it takes us to such an intimately embodied and everyday aspect of some dauntingly high-level concerns – ideas around culture, identity, history, descendency, and genealogy.
The tangled food heritages of the Cape reference indigenous foodways, the slave diaspora established by the Dutch, missionary proselytization, British colonialism, apartheid segregation and forced removals, and the ambiguities of post-apartheid reconciliation and restitution.
But in Elandskloof food heritage provides a narrative of both hope and loss.
The forced removal of the residents during apartheid had a devastating impact on the intergenerational knowledge system in this community. This traumatic dispossession allowed for some practices which took place before the forced removals to disappear. This loss of knowledge is evident from the conversations with the community members. More specifically, Elandsklowers could live sustainably from homegrown crops before the forced removals. This dependency on homegrown crops becomes significant in understanding how other knowledges were created such as recipes. This community currently remains vulnerable as these knowledges and practices seem to disappear with the older generation.
Hybrid knowledge
Can a community recreate lost indigenous knowledge and incorporate new information?
Although Elandskloof is struggling, there is evidence that local and shared knowledge played an important role in adapting to the changing climate but at a very minimal level. Residents recognised that the drought has become an ideal climate in which Buchu and other crops could flourish however, this process is once again hindered by deep divisions within the community. The community has also recognised that they require further knowledge around soil quality and climatic changes to fully benefit from the available land that is still accessible to them.
Questions around heritage surfaces within this community in various ways. The preservation of their tangible heritage has become a point of concern for some residents. At the heart of the community lies the remnants of two-valued buildings, the church, and the community hall or school building. which was part of the original construction when the Elandskloof as a missionary town was established. These buildings are recognised by the community as valuable sites in which learning and worship still take place. These buildings also serve as an important space where residents can find common ground through shared practices such as worship, the hosting of bazaars, and, more importantly, a place for commemorating the past (events are often held by local community leaders in which they try and prompt dialogue on Elandskloof’s history).
What became more prominent, however, is the loss of intangible heritage. Interviews with residents revealed that there is a great loss of intergenerational knowledge due to forced removals. The violent separation of this community has interrupted important practices which depended on generational knowledge passed from father to son or from mother to daughter. One example of these practices includes the importance of food heritage. Residents corresponded that they try and live from what they grow in their gardens, this practice is now only seasonal and stands in stark contrast to before the forced removals (this is confirmed through archive research conducted in the Dutch Reformed Church archives). Most of the recipes that were collected through each visit existed only through memory and were all handed down from mother to daughter. These recipes were designed to be accommodating to the type of crops cultivated in the Elandskloof community.
Many of the residents expressed the need for valuable helpful data on climate and agriculture.
While Elandskloof is still under administration which prohibits the cultivation of the existing orchard, some community members have collectively planned new areas for harvesting on the land for Elandskloof
It is evident from visits that the community would benefit from access to climactic information, including this information with some of the indigenous knowledges would be beneficial and could promote a new sense of cohesion in the community. Currently the question of land is still a contentious point within the community.
The future of Elandskloof remains uncertain for the residents. While some responded hopeful with renewed efforts around agricultural cultivation, there was a sincere concern toward the future of Elandskloof. Most residents expressed that the future of Elandskloof is reliant on the new generation who, according to older residents, show little interest in the legacy of Elandskloof. Residents in Elandskloof prioritise day-to-day planning rather than long term planning however there is a concern for climactic threats in the future.
Currently the residents have remarked some drastic seasonal changes such as re-occurring veld fires as well as higher snow-fall in winter months.
The residents however have not yet adapted to these changes. In some instances it was remarked that the out of the ordinary dry seasons have had some benefit in the cultivation of Buchu and that this specific indigenous crop thrives in these conditions. Current community driven projects have been focused on the planning of new crop cultivation which includes the planting of Rooibos Tea, watermelon, green beans and protea (also known as “tolbos”). They are still unsure which crops the soil will support. The new crops will have a direct effect on food heritage and offer an opportunity to rebuild lost food knowledges. The intention of the planting of these new crops is aimed at uplifting the current state of Elandskloof in hopes of returning to a new self-sustaining community. Some of the community plans include the use of some of the natural water sources in the area, the main source being a river which currently runs through Elandskloof.
Policy makers such as Cape Nature are urged to approach members of this community for more inclusive decision making, specifically on the decisions which apply to the Cederberg Nature Reserve. While Elandskloof has attempted to independently manage some of the available opportunities such as the implementation of new small-scale farms on available plots of land, this process has been hindered by the lack of funds and inter-community disputes on decision making. This community will benefit from any assistance which could be provided on any environmental changes. This will assist with the community’s strategy to currently complete agricultural projects which will have a beneficial impact on Elandskloof not only in returning to self-sustainability but also towards the recovering and creation of indigenous knowledges.
This is one of the ArcGIS story map series from the CRITICAL project. Dr Rowan Jackson set up the story map from the South Africa case study provided by Prof Siona O’Connell and Dominique Wnuczek-Lobaczewski (nee Niemand).
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