Tommasini Canestrelli, Ana Paula (2023). Data from: A climate vulnerability assessment of cultural heritage in the La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site World Heritage Site. UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. https://doi.org/10.6075/J0BZ666N

Climate change poses a threat not only to the environmental and physical aspects of the places where people live, but also to their identities and ways of living, as well as those of the communities around them. Conducted as part of the requirements of the Master of Advanced Studies in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), this capstone project consists of a climate vulnerability assessment of the La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site World Heritage Site in Puerto Rico, based on a literature review of existing scientific data. Its purpose is to inform a broader effort led by SIO’s Human Ecology Lab, which will complement this top-down approach with a bottom-up assessment of climate change threats to the area based on the perspectives of local stakeholders.

This project includes two products: a full climate vulnerability assessment available on e-Scholarship and an online summary of its main findings with interactive maps, which can be found at https://arcg.is/1quumK. Ultimately, this project contributes to the ongoing development of a climate vulnerability assessment tool for cultural heritage that can be used independently by stakeholders to meaningfully assess the vulnerability of their own cultural heritage to climate change through a decentralized process that can inspire local climate action, inform decision-making at different levels, and be repeated consistently as the components of vulnerability change over time.

Five main climate change threats relevant to Puerto Rico were covered: increasing temperatures, decreasing precipitation, ocean acidification, sea level rise, and more frequent and intense storms. As the last two are drivers of increased coastal flooding, an analysis of different coastal flooding scenarios based on geographic information system datasets available online is also presented to provide a visual indication of the impacts expected. The data set included here contains separate layers for sea level rise from NOAA's Sea Level Rise Viewer Tool, and layers for other relevant variables produced by the Coastal Resilience Evaluation and Siting Tool (CREST), acquired in Spring 2023.

ArcGIS Pro was used to overlay the coastal flooding datasets found with the geographical boundaries of the La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site World Heritage Site, according to the most recent boundary modification adopted by UNESCO in 2016. This analysis made it possible to quantify the area of the La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site World Heritage Site affected under different scenarios and to identify which locations within the site are most threatened.

• 2023-04-03 to 2023-06-09

• 2023

• Tommasini Canestrelli, Ana Paula

ArcGIS Pro 2.9.5

• San Juan Bay (Puerto Rico)

• Climate change
• Climate vulnerability assessment tool
• Coastal flooding
• Communities
• Cultural heritage
• Cultural identity
• Global warming
• La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site
• Ocean acidification
• Policy
• Sea level rise
• Storm surge
• Vulnerability

Point: 18.465540,-66.105736

• data

• English

Primary associated publication

• Tommasini Canestrelli, A. (2023). A climate vulnerability assessment of cultural heritage in the La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site World Heritage Site. UC San Diego: Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Retreived from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/95z421f7

Source data

• National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF). Coastal Resilience Evaluation and Siting Tool (CREST) (Puerto Rico). Accessed Spring 2023. https://resilientcoasts.org/
• NOAA's Sea Level Rise Viewer Tool. Accessed Spring 2023. https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr.html

Described by

• Tommasini Canestrelli, Ana Paula (2023). "Climate Change & Cultural Heritage: A climate vulnerability assessment of the La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site." Capstone Project for the Master of Advanced Studies in Marine Biodiversity & Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). https://arcg.is/1quumK

Other resource

• Human Ecology Lab, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO): https://humanecology.ucsd.edu/

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

• UC Regents

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2023-08-09