Climate Inheritance

Climate Inheritance is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of world and heritage in the Anthropocene. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites—from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands—have garnered empathetic media attention in a landscape that has otherwise failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, DESIGN EARTH casts ten World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks—rising sea levels, extinction, droughts, air pollution, melting glaciers, material vulnerability, unchecked tourism, and the massive displacement of communities and cultural artifacts—all while situating the present emergency within the wreckages of other ends of world, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism. The possibilities of such climate inheritances are narrated in drawing triptychs and mythologies that bequeath other worlds and values.