Our Roadmap to 2030Lead Organisation
Sustainability West Midlands
Project Delivery team: Morgan Roberts (Project Manager), Louis March-Smith (Project and Data Officer), Alan Carr (Climate Change Adaptation Lead)
Customer
Historic England
Overview
The impacts of climate change on cultural heritage, from individual assets up to the landscape scale, are already being observed across England. As the Government’s statutory advisor on heritage, Historic England (HE) has a significant role to play in understanding and managing these risks.
From November 2025 to March 2026, SWM worked with Historic England (HE) to produce recommendations for its in-house training team on how to produce training materials that successfully help heritage asset owners, managers, local authorities and other decision/policy makers use a ‘long-term contingency planning approach’ to manage climate-driven change within and increase the resilience of the historic environment in England.
Activities
The recommendations provided were informed by:
- SWM’s existing expertise on adaptation and communicating complex and challenging subjects through training.
- Work HE had already undertaken, such as a ‘user needs assessment’ for climate adaptation skills in the heritage sector.
- A range of stakeholders across the heritage sector in the UK who SWM engaged with throughout the project.
By way of stakeholder engagement, we:
- Met with the in-house training team, policy team, and team developing the long-term contingency planning approach.
- Consulted key partners of HE across the UK through online meetings.
- Presented to various relevant steering groups, including HE and partners.
Outputs
Image Credit: Historic England Archive
The outputs produced for HE were:
- The Adaptation Training Recommendations Report, including:
- Key principles and recommendations for undertaking training.
- Recommendations on who the priority recipients of the training should be.
- A ‘master curriculum’ of recommended content.
- Structure and presentation recommendations focused on six key training delivery methods.
- Recommended next steps for the in-house training team to effectively use these recommendations.
- A Summary report for HE which it can use to share key findings with external partners, providing a high-level summary of the recommendations and an introduction emphasising the importance of this work aimed at senior leadership.
- A slide deck for HE to use when presenting the findings of the Adaptation Training Recommendations Report.
- A list of existing training and resources on adaptation and heritage for reference.
All outputs above were provided for HE’s internal use and therefore will not be published. For any questions or further information, please contact us (see below).
SWM thoroughly enjoyed working with the HE team and partners throughout this project, and hope to work with HE again in the future.
Testimonial
It has been a great experience to work with SWM on this project. The report that SWM developed for us will help us as we consider our next steps to support the heritage sector increase its understanding of climate adaptation and build resilience. SWM’s recommendations will help us to design and produce training and knowledge sharing opportunities that meet the needs of a range of stakeholders. Their ability to reach out to a variety of stakeholders was invaluable to this piece of work, and their collaborative approach to working with our team meant that they were able to tailor the project outputs to our needs as the project developed.
Kate Guest, Senior Policy Adviser (Climate Change), Historic England
For further information on the project or to work with us in one of a variety of ways, please see our consultancy page or contact the SWM team at enquiries@swm.org.uk.
