Cultural Heritage: a connecting factor between GEO engagement priorities
The Urban Heritage Climate Observatory (UHCO) is a new Community Activity within GEO, working to reveal the fast-paced growth of EO technology and information to help address climate change risks and impacts on World Heritage Cities. UHCO operates upon the common ground of climate, heritage and urban related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also cutting across the other GEO priority engagement areas. This is apparent through advancing climate adaptation, enhancing preparedness to disasters, and having climate-aware World Heritage Cities serving as strong advocates for carbon neutral and resilient cities. There is a broad range of free and open access EO data to be contributed to this activity, including in-situ and other types of datasets. However, issues surrounding confidentiality and ownership of certain cultural heritage information exist, and there are great challenges to be discussed with respect to data sensitivity in the frame of Open EO.