Water heritage is a city's adaptation memory. Cisterns, aqueducts, fountains and piers hold centuries of answers to drought and heat.
November 18, 09:00 - 10:30
This session presents the Hydro-Cognitive Heritage Initiative of the UNESCO Chair HEWACC (Haliç University, Istanbul) and launches its Call for Action: bring a site, share a method, record before loss. With the Golden Horn in Istanbul as the proposed pilot site, we show how water heritage can be read at five scales (body: climate shelter; structure: adaptation; watershed: water stewardship; coast: resilience; society: climate literacy), documented as open data and turned into measurable inputs for adaptation planning. The pilot is at proposal stage, so the session is an invitation, not a results report: a short presentation followed by an open discussion with water, heritage and city actors on a shared inventory of water heritage for the Extended Mediterranean Basin.
The session links to the negotiations or priority themes of COP31 The event speaks to the Global Goal on Adaptation. Target 9(g) of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience addresses the protection of cultural heritage from climate-related risks and climate-resilient infrastructure guided by traditional and local knowledge, and the adaptation indicators adopted in Belém (COP30) include indicators on cultural heritage. The initiative proposes a way to produce site-level data for them. It also matches the COP31 thematic programme: cultural heritage and traditional and local knowledge (18 November) and resilient cities and the built environment (12 November). Finally, it addresses non-economic loss: buried streams, lost piers and fading fountains, recorded before they disappear.
