Exploring Voices of Scottish Youth through Future Heritage Imaginaries amidst the Climate Crisis

As climate change progresses, there is a growing need to incorporate more diverse and intangible knowledges of cultural heritage into risk-informed decision-making to strengthen community resilience and climate change adaptation. Despite efforts to expand heritage discourse to consider more intangible, place-based, and community-led approaches, there remains a key knowledge gap around how children and young people understand and value their heritage. As the ‘future generations’, youth today play a key role in building heritage resilience and adaptation, yet they have been historically underrepresented in relevant knowledge production and decision-making spaces. Using participatory arts-based methods, this project engages children and young people in conversations around what cultural heritage means to them in order to illuminate previously unheard heritage stories and values that can inform more inclusive climate change risk frameworks to protect cultural heritage for the future, by the future.