Jostina Dhimitri

I am an Associate Professor at the Faculty of History and Philology, University of Tirana. I am a member of the Europeana Network Association. Climate change and its impact on human-nature relationships is the focus of my studies. Climate change has a great impact on natural and cultural heritage at local, regional and global level. We see it every day and explore it in our professional work.

Among the issues that I would like to contribute would be those in the field of education, since I have a long experience in this field as well as aspects of identifying issues, barriers that converge between climate change and cultural heritage.

I have experience in organisational steering committees, and I would also like to contribute to undertaking genuine thematic studies focusing on the impact of climate change on natural heritage. They can be at the local level and I can concretise them for Albania. Cultural heritage impacts a wide range of developments such as tourism, revitalisation of various urban or rural areas, and economic development of a country as a whole. Climate change which has brought a more frequent frequency of phenomena such as floods, storms, intense rainfall, heat waves etc, can also affect the cultural and natural heritage of the country depending on its geographical position.

Climate change requires climate adaptation to avoid potential losses and I think that the focus of actions should be on identifying the different types of barriers that appear in the adaptation process in order to establish links between the climate change processes and the management of climate impacts in the process of human adaptation to them. It is necessary to create models of action plans, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in terms of adaptation to climate change. Obstacles can be of different types such as socio-economic, institutional, financial, and technical. Various actions can be taken towards these barriers and different strategies can be formulated to improve knowledge about climate change and heritage; raising awareness of the benefits of both natural and cultural heritage; strengthening public support for conservation; development and implementation of climate adaptation and heritage policies, and more.