RAPID ASSESSMENT OF COASTAL FLOODING VULNERABILITY OF HERITAGE SITES: OPTIMIZATION AND LIMITATIONS

The risks of losing cultural heritage whether natural values or historical artifacts enhanced the importance of assessing the vulnerability of these sites to climate change impacts. Coastal flooding and inundation vulnerability of these sites are being assessed at different scales, focusing on one site (Anzidei et al., 2020) to all sites of a continent (Vousdoukas et al., 2022). For regional to larger-scale assessments, the assessment methods tend to be desk-based using indicators and simpler flood mapping approaches. A rapid assessment approach is a practical choice considering the high number of sites and the variety of shoreline characteristics considered. While the information provided by the rapid assessments is valuable in prioritizing the heritage sites considering the limits of adaptation resources, desk-based vulnerability studies are argued to be conservative in determining the number of vulnerable sites due to simplification of the physical processes, coarser datasets, and weak consideration of the local characteristics of the heritage area (Rivera-Collazo 2020). In this study, the requirements and limitations of rapid assessment methods for coastal flooding are discussed considering the differences between natural and archeological coastal heritage sites exposed to impacts of sea level rise. The selected sites, methods, and datasets are considered within the ongoing project “Vulnerability of Coastal Cultural Heritage Areas to Sea Level Rise and Its Impacts” (No: 122M613) funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkiye (TUBITAK).