The Submerged Landscapes Research Centre was invited to join, and present to, the new Climate CHange and Underwater Cultural Heritage Nertwork. Convened by Dr. Laro González Canoura and Dr. Hakan Öniz, nearly 40 participating organisations met online to iniiate the group's activities./ Participants represented governmental and academic groups from Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australasia.

The remit of the group springs from the growing awareness that climate change poses an increasing and largely unaddressed risk to underwater archaeology and underwater cultural heritage (UCH) across the world’s marine, coastal, and inland waters. Rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, coastal erosion, ocean warming, acidification, and altered sediment dynamics are accelerating the deterioration and loss of submerged archaeological sites, including shipwrecks, ports, and submerged landscapes. These impacts are often cumulative and irreversible, leading to the loss of cultural heritage before it can be adequately documented or understood.

Despite the emerging scientific consensus on ocean-related climate impacts, UCH remains weakly integrated into climate policy, marine spatial planning, and adaptation frameworks. Current heritage management approaches are fragmented, predominantly reactive, and lack systematic risk assessment methodologies aligned with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concepts of hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and risk. Unlike natural and built heritage, underwater cultural heritage is rarely considered within IPCC-informed climate models, national adaptation plans, or EU-level climate resilience strategies.

This gap is compounded by limited baseline data, inconsistent monitoring, and uneven capacity across national jurisdictions, constraining the ability to prioritise sites, allocate resources effectively, or plan for adaptation and managed loss where preservation in situ is no longer viable. As a result, underwater cultural heritage continues to lag behind other environmental and cultural sectors in the application of evidence-based, climate-informed decision-making.

Without the development of coherent, IPCC-aligned frameworks for assessing and managing climate risks to underwater archaeology, the UCH community faces the progressive and largely unrecorded loss of irreplaceable cultural assets. Addressing this challenge requires the integration of underwater cultural heritage into climate adaptation and mitigation policies, the adoption of standardised risk-based methodologies, and stronger alignment between archaeological practice, marine science, and climate-related governance.