Co-Creating Multi-Hazard Resilience Indicators for Historic Environments: A Context-Specific Assessment Framework

Measuring the resilience of historic areas is challenging due to their heterogeneity in scale, heritage type, multi-hazard exposure, and socio-cultural context, creating the need for a flexible framework aligned with the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) approaches. This study introduces the SHELTER framework, which takes the historic area as its primary unit of analysis while enabling a cross-scalar assessment, from artefact/building scale to urban and transregional contexts. Developed through a co-creation strategy and an extensive literature review, the framework integrates indicators for multidimensional, cross-scale, and systemic resilience assessment and monitoring. The indicators span hazards such as heatwaves, earthquakes, floods, subsidence, and wildfires and capture exposure and vulnerability, the latter being understood as the sensitivity and coping, adaptive, and transformative capacities of communities. Refinement using the RACER methodology yielded a concise yet comprehensive shortlist of indicators, providing both general overviews and specific insights tailored to historic environments. The framework’s efficacy was tested across five case studies, demonstrating adaptability and suitability in diverse historic areas. Overall, SHELTER moves beyond a traditional focus on physical vulnerability and risk management, offering a replicable, holistic set of resilience indicators that supports consistent assessment and monitoring while respecting the singularities of historic settings.