Project Team: Tanja Hoffmann, Ben Davenport, Dr. Dacia Viejo- Rose (University of Cambridge), Dr. Alisa Santikarn (University of Cambridge)

Project Support and Funding: The Leverhulme Trust

This pilot project, led by Tanja Hoffmann and conducted in collaboration with the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge, looks to create a new UK impact assessment methodology for assessing impacts to ‘heritage ecosystems’. Heritage ecosystems is the term we use to capture the interconnected relationships between people, their environment, and their recent and more distant pasts, and the significance they attach to these relationships.  For community members who have curated intangible aspects of their community, often for generations, existing measures of impact in strictly economic or environmental terms often fall short of the nuanced assessment a community feels their place-based heritage ecosystem deserves. Indeed, community concerns about impacts to place-based values are often categorized as a form of nimbyism or dismissed as the “price of progress”.  There is increasing demand however for a more sensitive approach to the measure of impact and a desire to better understand long-term, often indirect but significant, cumulative impacts of development. Such demand stems from both the government and the private sector, both of whom recognize that the negative impacts of large-scale development are disproportionately felt by local communities—some of whom receive little to no direct benefit. The pilot project studies the impacts of the proposed East West Rail corridor on heritage ecosystems identified by several South Cambridgeshire villages.

Sustainable Development Goal/s: