The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts (CCAHA), in partnership with Christopher Cameron of Sustainable Heritage, are introducing as Collections Climate Resiliency Cohort for collecting institutions (any museum, library, archive, historic site, and/or organizations with historic and/or cultural collections available to the public), with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The vast majority of land in both New Jersey and Delaware lies within what geologists call the Atlantic Coastal Plain, which has a heightened vulnerability to storm inundation and sea-level rise. Collecting institutions need to undergo a paradigm shift in their thinking, a monumental task, to begin to approach planning in a way that both increases sustainability efforts to mitigate their own contributions to climate change while also preparing and adapting for projected outcomes in an ever riskier world. The curated cohort of small institutions will commit to this paradigm shift by examining their everyday operations with a lens toward sustainability and climate change. We will provide sites with environmental dataloggers and work with them to collect environmental data including temperature, relative humidity, and dew point for a one-year period.
Following the year of data collection, we will then work with organizations to develop collections-focused environmental management plans for their sites, using energy efficient, low impact, and economical options whenever possible.
This program will create a sustainable community of practice for the participating organizations. It will also result in the creation of a practically applicable toolkit to guide sites in weaving sustainability and risk assessment into their planning and programming. It will do this by empowering organizations to create their own roadmap for the future based on environmental needs and potential risks. Cohort institutions will be both participants in the program while simultaneously helping to develop the toolkit that they themselves can utilize.