This podcast offers a review of the critical intersections between heritage and climate change debates, pointing towards existential, methodological, intellectual and contextual commonalities in order to chart a way forward that involves a collaborative conversation. Climate change has huge significance for heritage studies, as sites, objects and ways of life come under threat, or require management or adaptation. Many heritage sites, therefore, end up being used as indicators of ‘culture’ to be preserved. Although often overlooked, however, heritage is also key to examining the significance of climate change. Notions (and images) of the past are crucial to our understanding of the present, and are used to prompt actions required for a desired and sustainable future.

Rather than perceiving them as mere ‘products’, ‘indicators’ and ‘physical outcomes’, therefore, this podcast emphasises a processual understanding of both heritage and climate change, thereby making a creative space in which discussion of loss, ephemerality, transition and movement can occur. The podcast will put forward some theoretical and practical guidelines for how we should understand, represent and manage the heritage-climate change relationship, and I will conclude, by reflecting on some of our contemporary struggles to be a good ancestor for the people of tomorrow.