Responding to the urgent threat of climate change on our coastal heritage

27 March 2025

An update to CIWEM’s ‘Postcards from the Edge’ report on changing coastlines addresses the unique challenges facing the UK’s heritage assets

CIWEM’s 'Postcards' report collates voices from coastal management practitioners across the UK and beyond, sharing real-world experiences, challenges and solutions. Through diverse perspectives, shaped by geography, socioeconomics, political context and evolving environmental pressures, this report captures the urgent realities facing our coasts.

From these insights, CIWEM’s Flood and Coastal Erosion policy panel has outlined ten policy recommendations to better manage the UK’s changing coastline. These include more flexible, pooled funding for coastal adaptation, shoreline management plans with greater powers in planning, and a national policy statement with cross-party support. Taken together, these recommendations will secure a sustainable and community-focussed future for our coastline.

This is an update on Postcards from the Edge I, launched at CIWEM’s Flood and Coast Conference in June 2024. The update includes new postcards from the Climate Change Committee, Historic England and from the University of Hull – the latter focusing on innovative arts and humanities approaches to coastal resilience.

The impact of coastal change

The coast has been fundamental to England’s history, reflected in physical remains of human activity that range from ephemeral traces of huge scientific importance to landmark buildings, and even to whole shoreline landscapes that owe their distinctive character to people’s intense connections with the sea across the ages.  

Coastal change presents inevitable challenges to tangible heritage that is predominantly immobile, highly valued, and has a very specific relationship to its location that has endured at least for decades, often for centuries, and even for millennia. Equally, coastal change has itself been underway over even longer timescales, prompting the creation of places we now regard as heritage, but also causing their degradation and loss. 

Historic England is the Government’s statutory adviser on heritage in England, including our coastlines and adjacent seas: coastal change has been an important consideration throughout the history of heritage management, but climate change has added greater urgency.

The UK’s Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3) underlines the impacts of climate change on heritage, noting that heritage assets at the coast are particularly vulnerable. With the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Historic England is developing an action plan to understand and communicate the threat to cultural heritage from flooding and coastal erosion. We have recently published a standardised vocabulary of climate hazards for heritage aligned with the methods and definitions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Heritage assets at the coast are subject to many of the same climate impact drivers and primary hazards that apply to heritage inland, but they are additionally subject to specific coastal hazards: sea level rise, storm surge, saltwater incursion, flooding, erosion, landslide and wave action. Such impacts have been summarised recently by the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) and by Gregory et al (2022).

How climate change mitigation can help

Climate change mitigation also has major implications for heritage at the coast: Historic England’s Marine Planning Unit provides development advice on the impacts on heritage of offshore wind, carbon capture and carbon sequestration, for example, most of which involve physical interventions where their infrastructure comes ashore. Equally, adaptation measures like the construction of enhanced flood and coastal erosion risk management (FCERM) assets, or groundworks and erosion prompted by managed realignment, can have a range of consequences for heritage that must be foreseen and addressed.

Climate change is also accompanied by the pressing need for nature recovery at the coast and by measures to address the inequalities and disparities faced by many coastal communities. These add to the complexities of change at the coast, creating challenges but presenting important opportunities for heritage to contribute to renaissance. 

In the heritage sphere we are pursuing three sets of outcomes: conservation – such that the physical remains of the past survive for future generations to explore and appreciate; understanding – so that we learn from the experience of our predecessors in facing our own futures; and public engagement – involving and sharing with the public the things we do and discover in their name. There are also the instrumental outcomes of heritage in terms of its social, economic and environmental benefits; these are being increasingly recognised and quantified. These outcomes provide a framework to guide how we negotiate challenges arising between the dynamic coast and its less flexible heritage. 

Our conventional concern is for heritage at risk from changing shorelines. This is a major issue as many heritage assets within ‘at risk’ zones are of such significance that they have been designated nationally or recognised locally. Many other heritage assets are at risk from coastal change that are significant nationally or to their local communities, but have not been designated because they fall outside the scope of heritage legislation or are being managed through other mechanisms.  

Concern is heightened where heritage assets are at risk from coastal changes where no human action is anticipated, such as heritage assets on cliffs or foreshores where ‘no active intervention’ is the policy. Heritage at the coast is also at risk from adaptation, nature recovery and/or regeneration if its presence and sensitivities have not been anticipated in optioneering and design: if it is left out of the mix, then heritage itself can present risks to consenting, budgets and timescales. 

A collaborative approach

Historic England is addressing heritage at risk from coastal change as its resources allow, including providing advice on the heritage implications of plans, strategies and scheme proposals of many hues. Historic England is also actively seeking greater engagement with sectors involved in coastal change where we think heritage can contribute positively to the outcomes sought by those sectors as well as to heritage outcomes.