The Role of Heritage in Disaster Resilience in Rural Communities in Portugal and Crete

Disasters often raise concerns about the loss of cultural and natural heritage – floods endanger landscapes, earthquakes destroy ancient temples, and fires engulf libraries. Typically, heritage has been viewed as something to be protected, with disaster management focusing on safeguarding sites.

This presentation takes a broader view, arguing that heritage – including shared practices, stories, and traditions – is a key factor in community resilience throughout the disaster management cycle. Drawing on findings from the Horizon Europe project RESILIAGE, the talk illustrates how (loss of) heritage can both exacerbate disaster impacts and enhance response efforts.

In the former case, the interior regions of Portugal have seen decades-long patterns of depopulation and impoverishment, leading also to a major erosion of practices and knowledge around soil management. As such, this grand-scale loss of heritage precedes and intensifies the local disaster of wildfires. With a local population’s gradual reduction of knowledge pertaining to how to prepare and respond to such seasonal phenomena, the absence of heritage plays a key role in the exacerbation of the region’s wildfires, themselves magnified by global climate change.

In Crete, by contrast, a process of demographic and economic decline has seen the increasing mistrust among citizens in the state’s ability to respond to a disaster. Against the backdrop of the region’s ongoing “polycrisis”, however, the Greek Orthodox Church maintains a strong local presence, drawing citizens together in shared rituals that strengthen community bonds, as well as mobilising persons into charitable action. Such persistence of local heritage proved pivotal in the 2021 earthquakes in the region, which saw a haphazard governmental response but a vigorous mobilisation effort from the side of the Church.

Such examples underscore the significance of accounting for local heritage as a driver of community resilience, and in impacting the intensity and frequency of a disaster.