Heritage, history, and humanity: Learning from the past to protect the future?

This issue of the Observer focuses on cultural heritage, how it can be protected, and what can be learned from past cultures in terms of resilience, adaptation and mitigation. More specifically, this issue’s articles show that to protect museums, libraries, cemeteries, temples, and other places of cultural significance, one must look at and learn from the past. When these valuable lessons are combined with modern knowledge, there is a chance to preserve these irreplaceable sources of inspiration and human identity for future generations.

This issue features the following articles:

• Protecting the dead: Cemetery preservation and disaster planning;
• Celebrating hazard cultures: a missed world heritage opportunity?;
• Plan for the worst and hope for the best;
• Saving Mona Lisa;
• Disaster risk reduction, Korean style.

Observer, Volume XL, Number 6, August 2016.