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Climate Change as the Ultimate Listed Building OfficerAs a heritage architect who has worked in this field for 30 years, I have spent my career trying to balance the needs of the present with the demands of the past. I have argued planning appeals in front of hostile planning committees, negotiated with recalcitrant conservation officers, and designed solutions to win the hearts and minds of those who would see our historic environment eroded by modern development. Over the last five years, however, I have seen the balance of power in our profession shift so fundamentally that many of our dearly held conservation principles are being increasingly sidelined, one inflexible constraint after another.
Climate change has become, in effect, the ultimate listed building officer—one whose decisions cannot be appealed, whose requirements bring no compromise, and whose writ runs over our most precious heritage. This is not hyperbole. In England, from the coastal towns of Norfolk to the flood-threatened valleys of Yorkshire, environmental legislation is increasingly trumping heritage protection in a way that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. The uncomfortable truth is that we are entering an era where a Grade I listed building may be legally required to accept alterations that would previously have been rejected out of hand, not because the building is any less significant but because environmental requirements have acquired a statutory force that heritage protection simply does not have.
In this article, I explore the legal and practical mechanisms through which climate adaptation is re-shaping heritage conservation, the cases in which environmental requirements have overridden traditional protections, and the existential implications for those of us who have dedicated our lives to preserving the historic environment.
The Legal Architecture of Environmental Supremacy
To understand how we have arrived at this point, it is necessary to understand the fundamental difference in the legal character of heritage protection and environmental regulation. Heritage legislation, principally the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, operates on a framework of discretionary judgement. Section 66(1) of the 1990 Act, for instance, requires those who grant listed building consent to have “special regard” to the desirability of preserving listed buildings, but this is ultimately a balancing exercise. Harm to a heritage asset can be weighed against public benefits; conservation officers can be cajoled and reasoned with; planning inspectors can find that substantial harm is justified by overwhelming need.
Environmental law, by contrast, operates through a structure of mandatory requirements that allow little room for discretion. The Environment Act 2021 enshrined biodiversity net gain as a statutory requirement for most development. Flood Risk Assessments under the National Planning Policy Framework are no longer advisory documents but mandatory gatekeepers that can render a proposal undeliverable regardless of its heritage merit. The Climate Change Act 2008, with its legally binding carbon budgets, has created an obligation that cascades down through building regulations and planning policy with the force of statute.
Planning barristers at Landmark Chambers and other specialist sets have noted this divergence in legal character with increasing frequency in their case analyses. Environmental constraints are often binary: either a proposal satisfies flood risk requirements or it does not; either it achieves biodiversity net gain or it fails. Heritage harm, by contrast, exists on a spectrum and can be outweighed. This fundamental asymmetry means that when environmental and heritage requirements come into conflict, environmental law almost invariably prevails—not because heritage is unimportant but because the legal framework gives decision-makers no choice.
Planning Appeals: When Climate Trumps Conservation
The decisions letters of the Planning Inspectorate over the past three years paint a picture that should concern all involved in heritage protection. I cannot cite specific appeal references without risking client identification, but the typology of decisions is clear and consistent: where flood defence requirements, coastal erosion mitigation or climate adaptation measures come into conflict with heritage preservation, inspectors are increasingly finding in favour of environmental imperatives.
A typical example is the case of historic buildings in flood zones. A Grade II listed mill building requires flood resilience measures – raised floor levels, flood-resistant materials, removal of historic joinery at ground floor level. The local conservation officer objects; UK heritage and listed building architects prepare detailed assessments demonstrating substantial harm to significance. The inspector, bound by the sequential test for flood risk and the requirements of national policy, nevertheless concludes that the environmental imperative outweighs heritage harm. The decision is legally sound but represents a fundamental reordering of priorities.
Coastal erosion cases present even more stark choices. Historic buildings threatened by accelerating coastal retreat face a brutal calculus: accept hard engineering solutions that devastate their setting and potentially their fabric or accept managed retreat and ultimate loss. Several recent appeals concerning coastal heritage assets have seen inspectors approve sea defence works that would previously have been considered unacceptably harmful to setting, with explicit note taken of the fact that climate change has altered the balance of considerations.
The language in these decisions is telling. Phrases such as “overriding environmental necessity”, “statutory flood risk requirements” and “mandatory climate adaptation” appear with increasing frequency. Heritage harm is acknowledged, often in considerable detail, but is framed as regrettable but unavoidable, a casualty of legal requirements that admit no flexibility.
Biodiversity Net Gain: The Landscape Around Heritage
Biodiversity net gain does not apply directly to listed building consent, a distinction that gives cold comfort to those of us swimming in these waters, but its impact on heritage settings and the landscape around historic assets is both profound and growing. The mandatory 10% BNG requirement under the Environment Act 2021 is reshaping the very context in which heritage assets sit, often in ways that run completely counter to historic landscape character.
Historic parklands, designed landscapes, and the settings of country houses are especially vulnerable. A Capability Brown landscape, with its carefully composed vistas and subtly managed ecology, may be legally required to incorporate rewilding measures, native planting schemes, or habitat creation that fundamentally alter its character. The BNG calculation methodology, with its emphasis on habitat distinctiveness and condition, can also perversely favour the introduction of scrub and rough grassland over the maintenance of historic parkland character.
I have worked on cases where the BNG requirement has led to the planting of substantial woodland blocks within the setting of Grade I listed buildings, obscuring historic views and altering the relationship between building and landscape that has existed for centuries. The local planning authority, sympathetic to heritage concerns, nonetheless concluded that the statutory BNG requirement left them no room for discretion. Sustainability architects trying to balance these competing demands are finding themselves caught between irreconcilable legal obligations.
The National Trust: Impossible Choices
The National Trust’s own climate hazard mapping, which shows around 70% of their properties facing medium to high risk from climate impacts by 2060, offers a sobering illustration of the scale of the challenge. These are not abstract projections but concrete threats: coastal properties facing accelerating erosion, historic buildings in flood plains seeing more frequent inundation, gardens and landscapes stressed by changing rainfall patterns and temperature extremes.
The Trust’s land managers and property teams face choices that would have seemed unimaginable to previous generations of custodians. Do you install modern flood defences that will protect a historic building but devastate its setting? Do you accept managed retreat from coastal properties, allowing centuries of heritage to be lost to the sea? Do you alter historic drainage systems and landscapes to enhance climate resilience, knowing that you are fundamentally changing their character?
These are not hypothetical dilemmas. The Trust has already made the hard choice to allow some coastal properties to be lost to erosion, judging that the cost—financial, environmental and in terms of setting – of defending them is unsustainable. Historic gardens are being redesigned for drought resilience, with traditional planting schemes replaced by climate-adapted species. Building fabric is being altered to improve thermal performance and flood resilience, even where this causes heritage harm.
What makes these decisions particularly agonising is that they are often driven not by choice but by legal requirement. Flood risk assessments mandate interventions; insurance requirements necessitate adaptations; environmental legislation requires landscape changes. The Trust, for all its heritage mission, finds itself bound by the same environmental laws as any other landowner and those laws are becoming increasingly inflexible.
Hannah Fluck is a Heritage consultant, who at the time of writing had an associate role with Historic England, where she worked on climate adaptation guidance. I asked Hannah about her experiences in this area:
Heritage and Climate Adaptation: The Silent Erosion of Significance (Hannah Fluck)
I want to start by acknowledging the sensitivity and complexity of this subject, which I’ve grappled with during my time as an associate at Historic England. We are all, to varying degrees, getting our heads around a new reality. Historic England’s own climate adaptation reports can be seen as among the most sensitive and nuanced attempts to navigate this new landscape. They recognise the scale of the threat, but they also attempt to guide a path through this, one that preserves significance whilst also accepting that change is necessary.
The problem is, there are simply too few instances where our approach can be as thoughtful as the Historic England guidance might suggest. The stark reality is that the legal framework within which we are all operating has skewed almost entirely in favour of the environmental demands. The guidance, including that on adapting historic buildings for climate resilience, is sound and principled. It is of excellent quality and should be the starting point for any work of this kind. But it cannot and does not trump statutory environmental requirements.
The adaptation reports from the Climate Change Committee set the tone and make perfectly clear that the historic environment needs to adapt or perish. Their third Climate Change Risk Assessment makes clear that heritage assets are, as a sector, particularly at risk and that flooding, coastal erosion, temperature and humidity extremes are all set to cause catastrophic loss.
Historic England’s response has been to promote an approach to adaptation that I would characterise as “climate-sensitive conservation” – one that accepts adaptation as necessary but also aims to retain as much significance as possible. This is, of course, both pragmatic and necessary but also a very big change in emphasis from the traditional conservation approach. We are moving away from a paradigm of preservation and towards one of managed change, which is being driven by environmental law rather than heritage judgement.
If the conflict between climate adaptation and heritage protection is particularly acute for listed buildings, it is existential for scheduled monuments. Theoretically, the most protected of our heritage assets, there is a strong presumption against any works that would damage or disturb them. And yet, we are already seeing scheduled monument consent being subordinated to environmental demands.
Flood defence schemes are the starkest example of this conflict. A scheduled monument — an Iron Age hillfort, a medieval moated site, a Bronze Age barrow or anything else – is in the footprint of a flood defence scheme which is seen as necessary to protect downstream communities from flood risk. The choice is a brutal one: damage or destroy the monument or accept the flood risk to inhabited land. In practice, the flood defence scheme almost invariably goes ahead, with archaeological mitigation (often excellent) but inevitable harm to the monument’s integrity.
I have been involved in consultations on flood defence schemes where flood engineers, environmental consultants and heritage professionals have wracked their collective brains to see if there is any way of avoiding harm to scheduled monuments, and have ended up realising that the environmental imperative (backed up by its statutory force and the liability that the consulting engineers would face should flooding occur) leaves no real alternative. The scheduled monument consent goes through, often with conditions for archaeological recording and mitigation, but the monument is altered at the same time as it is in effect (sometimes literally) half destroyed.
Coastal erosion presents parallel problems. Scheduled monuments on eroding coastlines are faced with a choice between hard engineering solutions that damage their setting and fabric or managed retreat and eventual loss. Historic England and Natural England have jointly concluded that managed retreat is in these cases preferable to the environmental damage that coastal defences would have caused in several cases – that is to say, they have accepted that the loss of the monument is the lesser evil.
These are not failures of our planning system, or of our heritage protection. They are the logical outcome of a legal hierarchy in which our environmental obligations have an almost monopolistic force.
The Environment Act 2021: Cementing the Hierarchy
The Environment Act 2021 is the most significant piece of environmental law since the great statutory reforms of the 1980s. It contains, of course, the Net Gain principle, the statutory requirement for biodiversity net gain on developments, and will have significant implications for heritage protection. It also sets out a new framework for environmental governance that will shape the decision-making of planning authorities and planners for years to come.
In many ways, the Act signals the point at which heritage architects and listed building architects enter a new landscape of constraint. Biodiversity net gain, as I have mentioned, will in many cases affect heritage settings, even if it is not technically relevant to listed building consent. The Act’s provisions for environmental improvement plans and local nature recovery strategies will affect the context within which heritage assets sit, and in ways that are often antithetical to their historic character.
More importantly still, the Act signals a direction of travel in which environmental considerations become not merely material considerations in the planning balance, but statutory requirements which must be satisfied. That is the critical difference: when we weigh heritage harm against public benefits we have a discretion to decide that the public benefits outweigh the harm. When we are faced with statutory environmental requirements, they must be satisfied. The legal architecture is asymmetric and we are on the wrong side of that.
Planning lawyers and barristers specialising in the overlap of environmental and heritage law have both been picking up on this for some time. The traditional planning balance in which heritage harm is weighed alongside other considerations is giving way to a framework in which environmental requirements act as threshold tests. A failure to satisfy flood risk requirements or biodiversity net gain, or (once the Act is in force) to show how a development fits within the local environmental plan will be fatal. But a proposal that causes heritage harm can go ahead if other public benefits (including the environmental benefits) outweigh the harm.
Flood Risk Assessments are, by far, the most powerful tool in the environmental law armoury at present and one of the most significant for heritage assets. The sequential test, the exception test. They are not guidance. They are mandatory requirements. If satisfied they allow proposals to go forward, and if not they render those same proposals effectively undeliverable.
Developments in flood zones, and by that I mean the majority of listed buildings that are in Flood Zones 2 or 3, are simply caught up in a tension that cannot be resolved in most cases. There is an increasing dissonance between traditional construction and materials and the modern requirements for flood resilience. Historic floor levels cannot be raised without fundamental alteration to the character of a building. Lime plaster, traditional timber joinery, traditional insulation and traditional construction methods are all vulnerable to flood damage in ways that modern equivalents are not.
The result is a very steady erosion of historic fabric and character, not by neglect or insensitivity, but driven by a legal requirement. Conservation officers may object, heritage architects will have alternatives, but if the Flood Risk Assessment says certain things are necessary, they will be. I use the language of planning decisions for a reason: flood risk requirements are “mandatory” or “essential”, whilst heritage harm is “regrettable” or “unfortunate”.
I have been involved in cases where every single alternative has been worked through, where heritage architects and flood engineers have worked together intensively to find a way through, and where we have concluded that the flood risk requirements have left no room for compromise. The historic building has to be altered, or it cannot be occupied, so alteration has to happen. The choice is between heritage harm and abandonment, and abandonment leads to decay and, eventually, loss.
Conservation in an Environmental Legal Hierarchy: Managed Retreat from Heritage
The bad news, we’ve all heard it. The Historic England climate hazard mapping shows 70% of National Trust properties at medium or high risk from climate change by 2060; the HLF Draft Climate Emergency plan for Culture makes for grim reading; those in the field know only too well. What most people haven’t thought through yet is what this means in practice for conservation. The professional reality on the ground is that environmental law and policy has already become the most important and least flexible constraint on development in the historic environment; more restrictive in many cases than heritage protection itself.
An example from the field, I use coastal erosion here but this is equally true of flooding:
Coastal Erosion: Managed Retreat from Heritage
The default position on the coast is managed retreat. The heritage implications of this are stark, and immediate. Our most tangible, visceral example of climate change clashing with heritage protection is the loss of coastal heritage to erosion. The coastline is retreating at ever-faster rates, with hundreds of heritage assets at risk, from medieval churches to Victorian seaside piers and architecture. The historic response—hard engineering defences—is increasingly environmentally unsustainable, and unacceptable. The default policy position is now managed retreat in preference to coastal defence, a presumption in favour of non-intervention with the consequent effect on heritage assets.
For heritage assets, managed retreat = loss. A 800-year old medieval church, that has weathered storms and sea level rise for centuries, will now be given a “shelf life” of a decade or two before it too becomes unsustainable and is allowed to fall into the sea. A Grade II\* listed coastal villa, 150 years old next year, will be abandoned and left to be battered and reclaimed by the waves. This is not in 2060 or 2090, this is happening now, with planning committees and appeal hearings all along coastal England making decisions to abandon heritage assets to the sea.
The legal protection available is limited. Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs), which set out the strategic approach to coastal management, will increasingly adopt “no active intervention” or managed retreat as the preferred option over coastal defence, meaning the opposite of heritage protection. These SMPs are based on an environmental assessment of the coast, a cost-benefit analysis of different approaches, and a consideration of the sustainability of different options over time – but that last factor is the heritage value, which is noted and acknowledged but almost never overrules the economic and environmental case for retreat.
I have sat in meetings where heritage professionals, local community members, and property owners have begged for coastal defences to be built to protect historic buildings only to be told they are environmentally unsound and economically unviable. They will be recorded and their significance noted, but then they will be allowed to be lost. This is triage and the historic environment is on the wrong side of the line.
It is a similar story for flood risk management. It is axiomatic that with the environmental legal hierarchy now in place we will almost never be able to stop a scheme that will cause flood damage to a heritage asset. The “undertakings” that planning committees will extract in exchange for allowing alterations that cause harm are often window-dressing: of little or no effect in practice, but designed to show we have taken account of the issues. The flow of expertise has also gone one way only: we are used to working with planning officers, planners and other built environment professionals. Flood engineers and environmental consultants operate in their own silo, with their own professional constraints and understanding of statutory legal requirements. If they are told heritage objects to alterations to drainage or landform that are required for compliance with flood risk or environmental policy, their instinct is to view these as irrational, misguided, and a block to work that is “simply required.”
There is an occupational hazard, too: when we raise heritage concerns about environmentally-mandated interventions we risk appearing obstructive or unrealistic. Flood engineers and environmental consultants, working within their own constraints and statutory requirements, may regard heritage professionals raising these objections as enemies of required work, impediments to sustainable drainage or flood risk management for no good reason. Planning committees hearing stark warnings about flooding or environmental liability may be content to see heritage harm as an acceptable cost for a development that will be environmentally compliant.
But if we do not advocate for heritage protection, who will? The legal framework may be weighted, the hierarchy in place, but that does not absolve us of responsibility to make the case for significance, to propose alternatives that may reduce or ameliorate harm, to ensure at least that heritage value is recognised and considered in decision-making even if it is ultimately outweighed by other factors.
So how do we do this, effectively? How do we make the case for heritage in a professional and policy context where environmental law is the elephant in the room, the ultimate listed building officer whose decisions are final? It will require on the one hand understanding and engagement with the environmental legal framework as detailed as our understanding of heritage legislation, working with flood engineers and ecologists as partners, not opponents, and accepting that some harm is unavoidable and we must work to minimise it where we can but not make our entire professional approach hostage to this reality.
It will also mean being honest about the limits of heritage protection. We cannot pretend heritage legislation has the same statutory force as environmental law, or conservation principles can trump mandatory flood risk requirements. What we can do is try to ensure heritage harm is minimised, significance is retained where possible, and the historic environment adapts in a way that retains as much character and meaning as is possible given the circumstances.
This is a new conservation philosophy: not preservation, but climate-sensitive conservation that accepts adaptation is necessary but fights for significance to be retained. If we cannot be in the room when those adaptation decisions are made, then the decisions will be made without us and the historic environment will be the poorer for it.
Climate change is the new elephant in the room, and it’s a very large elephant indeed. The message from the National Trust climate hazard mapping is clear: if this is happening to them, it is only a matter of time before it is happening to all of us. Climate change is not a future threat, it is a present reality and environmental law is the mechanism through which the reality of climate change is going to reshape the historic environment. We can resist it, or we can engage with it, but we cannot ignore it.
And it is the elephant at the table when heritage decisions are made. The final listed building officer. The professional reality on the ground is that environmental law and policy has already become the most important and least flexible constraint on development in the historic environment, more restrictive in many cases than heritage protection itself. This is not a temporary aberration, a policy oddity: it is a permanent realignment of the legal and policy hierarchy.
The consequences for conservation are profound and require a fundamental rethinking of the conservation philosophy itself. The old paradigm of resisting change and preserving historic fabric is unsustainable in the face of environmental legal requirements with statutory force. The new conservation philosophy has to be one of adaptation: accepting that change is required but retaining significance and character is a battle to be fought and won.
This is not a failure of conservation or capitulation. The alternative is rigid adherence to traditional conservation principles when those principles are up against legal requirements that have statutory force, in which case the historic environment is not conserved, it is just quietly abandoned or allowed to fall into disrepair and disuse and suffers greater harm as a consequence. The default position on the coast is managed retreat. For heritage assets, managed retreat means loss, and immediate loss: hard decisions being made right now in planning committees and appeal hearings all along the coast on which heritage assets are to be abandoned to the sea. We do not need new legislation, we need a new conservation philosophy: climate-sensitive conservation that takes as given that adaptation is required and fights for significance to be retained.
There are other hard decisions to be made too. For heritage professionals, in the context of the environmental legal hierarchy, it means a fundamental rethinking of conservation philosophy, a shift from preservation in the face of change to a new conservation philosophy that adapts and evolves with change. Environmental law is the new LPA, it must be central to our approach and heritage protection has to find a place within that environmental legal framework. This is the challenge that will define heritage conservation for the next generation and how we respond will determine what survives of England’s historic environment for generations to come.
