By Adebola Feyikemi Adedokun
HERITAGE is a dwelling and dynamic idea, interwoven with individuals and locations. It’s an expression of cultural range and completely different modalities.
It additionally contains tangible objects corresponding to monuments and historic buildings, movable and immovable sculptures and cultural landscapes in rural and concrete contexts, nationwide areas, ecosystems and biodiversity.
It additionally consists of intangible properties corresponding to oral traditions and expressions, language, performing arts, social customs, cooking, rituals and celebrations, information and practices regarding nature and the universe, and conventional craftsmanship.
As we speak, heritage websites are going through many challenges, particularly local weather change, corresponding to excessive warmth, drought and water shortages, melting gracias, unstable and excessive precipitation, cyclones, landslides and rising sea ranges.
This may increasingly additionally embrace earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and land improvement ensuing from mining actions.
In Nigeria, heritage websites should be extra taken into consideration in catastrophe threat planning, administration and safety and extra built-in into nationwide insurance policies and budgets.
Nonetheless, this has left heritage websites weak to important harm and destruction from disasters triggered primarily by pure and human actions.
Local weather change is already inflicting loss and harm to cultural heritage. This loss shouldn’t be restricted to historic heritage; it additionally impacts communities and their cultural traditions.
Nonetheless, there are common studies of large-scale disasters at heritage websites. These disasters have triggered nice harm to the heritage websites and the cities.
Given the exponential fee of urbanization, heritage websites are important for the cultural id of a metropolis. Subsequently, there’s a want for a specialised method to catastrophe threat administration of heritage websites.
Given the challenges posed by disasters, it’s crucial to develop methods for catastrophe threat administration of heritage websites. That is of utmost significance in total planning and administration.
Legal guidelines and insurance policies ought to be formulated based mostly on the precise traits of the heritage websites and the character of the hazards throughout the websites and the group.
These legal guidelines and rules ought to bear in mind the rules of threat administration and the response to historic, aesthetic and different heritage values, whereas additionally addressing extra vital challenges in city improvement.
This planning requires professional professionals, directors and coverage makers who can bear in mind varied points of growing threat administration plans for heritage websites.
- Adedokun is the top of museum schooling on the Nationwide Museum in Osogbo.
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