UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Anticipating Change: Exploring Long-term Futures for Heritage

2025-10-23

On the 16th of October 2025 ICCROM organized a workshop on Strategic Foresight in Heritage taking place in Rome, titled Anticipating Change: Exploring Long-term Futures for Heritage. The purpose of the workshop was to found a community for practice surrounding Strategic Foresight in heritage, to build resilience, relevance and agency among heritage organisations in the face of uncertainty and change.

Gustav Wollentz from the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures assisted in the organisation and facilitation of the workshop, contributing with a presentation on the value of Strategic Foresight in heritage and moderating parts of the agenda, which included both a hands-on Foresight exercise, the Futures Wheel, as well as a discussion on how to move forward together.

The goals of the newly established group are to:

  • Connect and amplify foresight and innovation efforts across the heritage sector. 
  • Co-developing and testing foresight methods in real-world heritage contexts. 
  • Building an open repository of trends, tools, and insights tailored to the sector’s needs. 

Together vid ICCROM, the workshop gathered representatives from the International Council on Archives, ICOM (International Council of Museums), IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions), NEMO (Network of European Museum Organizations), UNESCO, the French Ministry of Culture, the Swedish National Heritage Board, the Heritage Alliance, UK, the Fondation des Sciences du Patrimoine, France, the Getty Foundation, USA, and University College London, UK. 

More information on the workshop is available here: https://www.iccrom.org/news/anticipating-change-exploring-long-term-futures-heritage

Future-Making at Riksantikvaren (Norway)

On Wednesday, 22 October, Anders Högberg was invited by the Norwegian National Heritage Board (Riksantikvaren) to give a presentation on Heritage Practices as Futures-Making Practices. The presentation was well received, and the subsequent discussion centred largely on the novelty of the future-oriented perspective that was introduced, as well as on how one might think in order to translate future-oriented ideas into more concrete heritage practices.

Anders Högberg, professor of Archaeology and member of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University.

Heritage Futures for Nuclear Waste

2025-10-09

Cornelius Holtorf presented a talk entitled for cirka 100 participants at the Symposium on Information, Data, and Knowledge Management for Radioactive Waste: Challenges Across All Timescales, organised by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the OECD and hosted by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan (NUMO) in Yokohama, Japan (7-10 October 2025).

Heritage Futures: Archaeological Insights for the Long-term Management of Radioactive Waste

Cornelius Holtorf, UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University

Managing radioactive waste is a challenge that extends across many generations, requiring long-term safety measures. Archaeologists, like myself, are familiar with time scales of thousands of years as we seek to understand the distant past. A key part of our work involves questioning assumptions rooted in the present and learning to imagine past worlds that were vastly different from today. This is very difficult, but only after doing so can we draw meaningful insights from the past to inform the present. The same principles should apply when communicating information, knowledge, and guidance about radioactive waste repositories to societies of distant futures. This calls for a strengthened capacity in ‘futures literacy,’ a concept developed and promoted by UNESCO.

Futures literacy consists of three core dimensions: 1. Becoming aware of the assumptions we hold about the future, 2. Learning to imagine multiple alternative futures, and 3. Reframing the original issue and developing new strategies to address it.

In this paper, I explore this argument and discuss its implications for a long-term, safe and responsible management of radioactive waste. The paper is based on extensive research conducted by the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. The research has been carried out in collaboration with the radioactive waste sector in Sweden and internationally, including through participation in several expert groups of the NEA.

All timescales on the agenda

2025-10-08

I attended and contributed to a global Symposium on Information, Data, and Knowledge Management for Radioactive Waste, organised by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) for the OECD in Yokohama, Japan (7-10 October 2025). Over 100 participants attended from Japan and around the world.

From the conference blurb (shortened): radioactive waste is produced in all phases of the nuclear fuel cycle and from the use of radioactive materials in industrial, medical, defence and research applications. After creation and use, many countries have a policy of interim storage, followed by permanent disposal underground in engineered repositories located in suitable geological formations. Significant quantities of data and information are generated throughout this lifecycle with many countries now exploring the concept of a digital safety case. The operational period of nuclear generation facilities often covers several decades, while disposal facilities are designed to operate for even longer. This raises significant challenges as these timeframes span multiple generations of workers and are likely to see many changes in policy and technology. Moreover, even after disposal, there is now a consensus on the importance of adopting strategies to preserve awareness of waste and disposal facility for long periods of time. The NEA Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management (WP-IDKM) [to which Anders Högberg and Cornelius Holtorf belong] aims to co-ordinate these activities in a more holistic way, considering cross-disciplinary approaches and cognizant of all timescales of the information cycle. 

The conference addressed “Challenges Across All Timescales”, from imminent expert retirement to one million years and more in the future. This is about Heritage Futures for real!

I presented the following paper:

Heritage Futures: Archaeological Insights for the Long-term Management of Radioactive Waste

Managing radioactive waste is a challenge that extends across many generations, requiring long-term safety measures. Archaeologists, like myself, are familiar with time scales of thousands of years as we seek to understand the distant past. A key part of our work involves questioning assumptions rooted in the present and learning to imagine past worlds that were vastly different from today. This is very difficult, but only after doing so can we draw meaningful insights from the past to inform the present. The same principles should apply when communicating information, knowledge, and guidance about radioactive waste repositories to societies of distant futures. This calls for a strengthened capacity in futures literacy,’ a concept developed and promoted by UNESCO. Futures literacy consists of three core dimensions: 1. Becoming aware of the assumptions we hold about the future, 2. Learning to imagine multiple alternative futures, and 3. Reframing the original issue and developing new strategies to address it. In this paper, I explore this argument and discuss its implications for a long-term, safe and responsible management of radioactive waste. The paper is based on extensive research conducted by the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. The research has been carried out in collaboration with the radioactive waste sector in Sweden and internationally, including through participation in several expert groups of the NEA.

Meeting of UNESCO Chairs

2025-09-26

On 26 September 2025, I took part in a virtual meeting of the UNESCO Futures Literacy and Foresight Chairs, where the new Head of Section (the Management of Social Transformation Programme, MOST), Irakli Khodeli, and the new Head of Unit of Futures Literacy and Foresight, Clare Stark, presented their new priorities and discussed collaboration with the ca 20 (of a total of 36) Chairs represented in the meeting.

In general terms, the MOST programme aims at bringing the knowledge of the Social Sciences and Humanities to policy-making (which fits perfectly with our aims of the UNESCO Chair on Futures Literacy).

Among the planned and ongoing initiatives of UNESCO where FLF Chairs are expected to be involved are the World Futures Day Celebrations on 2 December 2025, a Signals Report on what lies on the horizon, and the conceptual development of a Flagship Report on Foresight for policy making, as well as a new UNESCO Futures Blog.

This meeting, bringing together 40+ UNESCO staff and UNESCO Chairs from around the work, exemplified multilateralism in action, noted Irakli Khodeli in the end.

Gamma Fields: The Industrial Legacy We Cannot Afford to Forget

2025-04-28

By Claudio Pescatore

What if the true monuments of the nuclear age are not vaults, vitrified blocks, or warning markers—but fields of invisible light?

  • Gamma radiation is insidious. It leaves no ruin, no ash, no wound you can see. You don’t need to touch it. You don’t need to breathe it in. You simply pass by—and it passes into you. No trace is left on the soil. But a trace is left in you. And when the next person passes, they too receive the signal. Yet the source remains—unchanged, unweakened.
  • Most poisons are spent as they harm. Gamma radiation is not. It accumulates elsewhere, silently, without diminishing its source. A kind of ambient inheritance.

In a recent study, I calculated the gamma radiation field unleashed by humanity’s Uranium-238 (U-238) legacy. The results show that this field is not temporary. It is already present, slow to mature, but geologically assured and radiologically significant, beyond safety thresholds.

  • Mill tailings scattered across continents emit gamma radiation through uranium’s progeny. This signal will slowly fade over the next half a million years—but it will reach a baseline, unsafe value and will continue indefinitely.
  • Meanwhile, depleted uranium stockpiles—which emit almost no gamma today—are quietly maturing. From a few thousand years onward, their gamma output will rise steadily, eventually overtaking significantly that of tailings, peaking in two million years, and continuing unabated into geological time.
  • Most U-238 residues lie close to the surface—mill tailings, depleted uranium (DU) stockpiles, weapons testing sites, contaminated soils from mining and from exploded DU munitions. Even when their radiation does not cause immediate harm, it defines a long-term environmental signal whose meaning we have barely begun to grasp.

This raises questions not only of science, but of ethics, inheritance, and imagination:

  • What does it mean to leave behind a hazard that grows in potency over time?
  • How do we warn future beings of a danger concealed in ordinary soil or dust?
  • Should gamma radiation be seen not only as threat, but also as a marker of human agency?

Nuclear waste lasts a long time. But U-238 isn’t just persistent—it performs. It changes. It regenerates. It returns. And surprisingly, we don’t call it waste. We call it an industrial by-product.

And now we are not just leaving behind a signal—we are leaving a body.

  • About 4.5 million tonnes of U-238, mostly in oxide form, now reside in uranium tailings, DU, and spent fuel. It is a real, physical legacy—not symbolic, not speculative. This body must be put away—not forgotten, but deliberately placed and traced. Shielded, marked, and remembered.
  • We can still act. We can treat uranium’s gamma legacy not as an afterthought, but as a defining part of our industrial inheritance. This won’t undo the past—but it may shape how future generations understand what we’ve left them.

We often speak of the nuclear age as bracketed—confined by Cold War dates or the operational lifespan of reactors. But its material consequences are just beginning. Care begins by acknowledging and tending to what endures.

Claudio Pescatore
Claudio Pescatore is a member of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University

Read more: http://www.nukleonika.pl/www/back/full/vol70_2025/v70n2p031f.pdf 

New article on urban transformation, heritage and social sustainability

2025-04-03

Bebyggelsehistorisk Tidskrift (Nordic Journal of Settlement History and Built Heritage): Urban transformation, heritage processes and social sustainable futures by Ulrika Söderström & Anders Högberg.

Short summary:

In this study, we use three case studies to discuss heritage processes as future-building practices. Through examples from urban regeneration processes in three Swedish cities, we discuss how these processes have contributed to social sustainability. The case studies are the Caroli neighbourhood in Malmö (transformed 1967-1973), the Valnötsträdet neighbourhood in Kalmar (transformed 2008-2018) and the ongoing transformation of Kiruna city. Our findings show that the cultural heritage processes activated in urban regeneration processes do not always promote socially sustainable future-making practices. We conclude that an engagement in different forms of future-making is crucial for heritage processes to contribute to long-term sustainable urban development. We suggest that this requires a way of thinking and acting that includes change and transformation. Our findings are conceptualised in a model that we hope can be used to understand heritage processes as future-making practices in urban transformation projects.

Bebyggelsehistorisk Tidskrift is a Nordic forum for research and debate on the history of the built environment. It is the Nordic region’s leading academic journal on the history of the built environment. The periodical presents the latest research on the history of the built environment, and also provides a forum for discussing the discipline in practice when buildings and heritage environments are being conserved.

https://bebyggelsehistoria.org/en/bebyggelsehistorisk-tidskrift-english/

Open access (Doctoral Thesis by Ulrika Söderström) https://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1901953

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POSTSCRIPT 13 April 2025. Here is a graphical summary of the paper prepared by ChatGPT:

Conference by the Swedish National Heritage Board

2025-03-24

Anders Högberg held a keynote lecture at the conference “Kulturarvsforskning i Sverige 2025” – Cultural Heritage Research in Sweden 2025, organised by the Swedish National Heritage Board 20-21 March 2025 in Stockholm. Keynote paper: ‘Cultural heritage research 2025 – some thoughts on where we stand and questions for the future’.

Ulrika Söderström also presented her dissertation at the conference: “Cultural heritage as a resource in socially sustainable urban development: A designed living environment for the future”.

More about the dissertation here

Kulturarvsforskning i Sverige 2025 -Riksantikvarieämbetet (The Conference Programme in Swedish)

Anders Högberg
Anders Högberg, Professor of Archaeology UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures
Ulrika Söderström
Ulrika Söderström, Doctor of Archaeology UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures

Future Day at Linnaeus University

2024-12-12

On December 3, 2024, the university management invited to a theme day in Växjö about Linnaeus University and the future. A recording of the event is available here https://play.lnu.se/media/t/0_tb0d3lc4

Cornelius Holtorf participated live in a panel discussion with Marie Hedberg, Pro Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Jörgen Forss, Vice Dean at the Faculty of Technology. Marcelo Milrad from the Faculty of Technology joined via link. The panel was chaired by Kerstin Årmann from the Office of External Relations.

Future Day at Linnaeus University 3 December 2024
Cornelius Holtorf in a panel discussion at the Future Day, Linnaeus University.

Workshop in Gothenburg

Anders Högberg and Gustav Wollentz from the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures were on the 22 November 2024 invited to conduct a workshop on future awareness for the management group at the Department for Nature and Cultural Heritage in the Region Västra Götaland. During the day we met 12 persons, and the workshop lasted for four hours. It took place at the Museum of Natural History in Gothenburg.

The main question we explored was: What will the museums’ societal role/mission look like in 2050? This question was approached through a series of sub-questions, for example with the aim of identifying societal challenges and how these can be proactively met through actions today.

The workshop was based on dialogue and the exchange of different perspectives and experiences. By such an approach, participants took on a more open approach to different types of futures in relation to the museums’ societal role and mission. In the exchange after the workshop, it was highlighted as particularly important to be able to approach the future as open where several different alternatives are conceivable. Participants expressed it as liberating not to see the future solely as an extension of the present, and to be able to seriously engage in considering alternatives for the future.

Museum of Natural History in Gothenburg
Museum of Natural History in Gothenburg. Photo Gustav Wollentz