EDHEC's climate risk model rates 43% of Europe's World Heritage sites highly exposed

The estimate is a location score. UNESCO's spatial database supplies the positions of the physical assets. The EDHEC Climate Institute's climate risk quantification methods attach hazard estimates to them for extreme weather, flooding and sea level rise, according to the authors' account published by phys.org ^[2]. The article states that share and the economic projections. It does not say where the high-exposure cutoff sits, how many European sites were scored, or which emissions scenario the economics assume ^[20].

The threats the authors list are material: increased humidity and mold on paintings and frescoes, deterioration of materials under temperature fluctuations, more acid rain, and more fires, floods and landslides ^[4]. Whether a particular church loses a fresco depends on its walls, its heating and whether anyone reads the hygrometer, none of which sits in a spatial database. The authors count failures of conservation systems among the exposures facing collections, alongside flooding, humidity swings and heat waves ^[21]. They argue the problem reaches past Venice and the Mediterranean historic centers into artifacts scattered through churches, libraries, local collections and small museums ^[3].

The economic half is where the numbers get large. Against Rome's projected regional figure, Italy's national GDP decline by 2100 is put at 19% ^[14], with Vienna at 13% and Berlin at 18% ^[15]. Subtract the national number from the Roman one and the city sits 22 percentage points below its own country's trajectory ^[16]. That gap is the concentration the authors describe when they say regional impacts are most pronounced in Mediterranean cities ^[19]. On the funding side they write that "It is precisely at the moment when the investment required to protect our heritage will be greatest that financial resources may be most limited" ^[18].

Spruce from the Val di Fiemme in the Dolomites, the tonewood used historically for Stradivarius violins, is under pressure from rising temperatures and the spread of pests ^[9]. Water stress and deforestation are making the woods used for bows and stringed instruments scarcer ^[10]. Those are supply chains, and they sit outside the database the exposure share was computed from. Beyond La Fenice, the authors place five coastal venues in the same category, among them the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and the Sydney Opera House ^[12].