On the paradox of conserving art on a warming planet, and who can afford it

Imagine the perfect room. Twenty-one degrees, fifty per cent relative humidity, without a single fluctuation. The work hangs in ideal conditions, protected from light, dust, and time. For decades, such stability was the unquestioned ideal of conservation: the more constant the environment, the better the work is cared for. What we did not often disclose is the cost of that constancy, nor what that cost works against.

Because maintaining that perfect room consumes significant energy. And energy, as long as it continues to originate primarily from its current sources, warms the planet. And a warming planet is precisely what threatens heritage: flooding, extreme heat, rising sea levels, humidity, and wildfires. Here lies the paradox I wish to unfold: the infrastructure that preserves the work contributes, through its consumption, to the crisis that places it in jeopardy. The apparatus that cares for art helps degrade the conditions of its own conservation.

1. The cost of the perfect gallery

Let us begin with what is measurable, without exaggeration. When the Hermitage Amsterdam compared its strictest climate strategy with somewhat more flexible climate classes through real-world measurements over a year, the energy savings were significant: approximately 49% when transitioning to one class, and 63% to another. The decisive aspect of the study is not merely the savings, but what accompanies them: conservators concluded that, for the majority of objects, the overall risk of degradation did not change significantly. Far more energy was being expended for protection that, for a large portion of the collection, was equivalent.

It is prudent to be honest regarding the scope of the data: it is one building, one year, one climate. It does not authorise the proclamation of a universal percentage regarding the extent to which climate control contributes to a museum’s carbon footprint—that aggregated, reliable figure, surprisingly, does not exist. Sectoral estimates circulate suggesting that climate control may account for 60% or more of an institution’s consumption, yet these lack a public methodology to fully substantiate them; I mention them as an indication, not as data. What remains firm is the direction: in museums with collections and demanding climates, climate control is a dominant component of energy expenditure, and relaxing requirements with sound judgement can release a substantial portion of that consumption without sacrificing actual conservation.

2. The standard was never a law of nature

Here, a dogma must be dismantled. The famous twenty-one degrees and fifty per cent humidity were treated for years as a scientific truth, almost a physical constant of art care. They are not. The Bizot group’s own green protocol—the coalition of major museums that has reviewed these guidelines—explicitly acknowledges that these figures possess no “fundamental scientific significance.” They were a reasonable starting point that petrified into a universal rule, applied equally to a robust oil painting and a fragile parchment, in Amsterdam and in the tropics, in an exhibition gallery and in a storage facility.

What conservation is doing now is not abandoning rigour, but replacing a single rule with risk management: what does this specific object require, with its material, history, and building, rather than what mandate applies to everything. And that represents a more profound shift than it appears. Conservation ceases to be a practice of isolated stabilisation—keeping every item in its ideal bubble—and becomes a practice of allocating finite resources. The question is no longer merely what is optimal for the work, but what is sufficient for the work given everything else: energy, carbon, budget, and climate. The question ceases to be technical and becomes, quietly, political.

3. Outside the gallery there is no thermostat

All of the above applies to what can fit inside a building. But a significant portion of heritage cannot: it is outdoors, and for a coastal city or an archaeological site, there is no thermostat to adjust.

Here the data are more sombre and more difficult to dispute. A study of forty-nine World Heritage cultural sites in low-lying coastal areas of the Mediterranean found that the majority are already at risk of flooding and erosion today, and that by 2100, under high sea-level rise scenarios, the proportion of threatened sites approaches totality. These are projections, with their explicit scenarios, not certainties; yet they indicate a change in the nature of the problem. Venice, Delos, Alexandria or a coastal cultural landscape are not objects that can be placed in a display case: they require dykes, drainage, monitoring, territorial defence, or the decision to accept loss.

And the museum’s own operation is placed under strain. A modelling study on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London projects that, in a high-climate-change scenario, gallery closures due to extreme heat could increase nearly tenfold compared to today; in a contained-emissions scenario, they would barely change. The difference between one future and another is not abstract: it is whether the gallery can remain open to the public in August. Conservation, viewed in this light, is no longer about restoring damaged objects: it is a matter of infrastructure—energy, building, and territorial—upon which the continued public accessibility of the work depends.

4. Who can afford to conserve

And here we arrive at what is, for me, the core, because the aforementioned paradox is not distributed equally. Conserving against the climate costs money, energy, and institutional capacity, and those resources are distributed in a profoundly unequal manner.

The asymmetry has two sides that should be named together. The first: those who have contributed most to the climate crisis—wealthy, industrialised nations—are those who possess the most means to conserve their heritage with intensive infrastructure and, furthermore, to finance their own energy transition. The second: those who have contributed the least—communities in the Global South, indigenous, rural, and coastal populations—suffer the most acute impacts and possess the fewest resources for both conservation and adaptation. The ICOMOS working group on climate action puts it bluntly: the change was caused primarily by those at the top; the damage is paid for primarily by those at the bottom.

There exists a more subtle inequality, which is one of data. Research into climate and heritage is overwhelmingly concentrated in Europe and North America, and on assets already inscribed on major international lists. Local, community, intangible, or uninventoried heritage appears less—and that which is not inventoried does not enter into models, insurance, funding, or even public mourning when it is lost. The climate inequality of heritage is also an inequality of measurement: that which is most vulnerable is, often, that which is least accounted for. Thus, the question of “what is conserved” carries within it a more uncomfortable one: which heritage is even in a condition to be defended, and which is deemed lost before the process even begins.

5. The calculation no one has performed

It is striking, when one searches, what one does not find. There is no reliable and comparable figure for the total cost of adapting cultural heritage to climate change under various emissions scenarios. There are budgets for specific European projects—a few million here, a call for twenty-one there—there are risk assessments by site, and there are reports. However, the curve that compares the cost of acting with the cost of not acting, which does exist for agriculture, health, or physical infrastructure, remains unplotted for cultural heritage.

This absence does not signify that the cost is low. It signifies something more revealing: that cultural heritage is not fully integrated into the climate economy, and that it has not been subjected to the accounting applied to other sectors. While that calculation remains unmade, heritage competes at a disadvantage for climate funding, as it cannot present its losses in the language—euros, scenarios, horizons—in which funds are distributed. The first region to produce serious heritage climate accounts will possess a considerable political advantage. Yet there is a risk in that very operation: reducing the value of heritage to its replacement cost or its tourism revenue is a means of impoverishing it, and a significant portion of what is lost—memory, identity, knowledge—cannot be contained within a spreadsheet.

6. Conservation as a decision, not a fiction

What follows from all this? Not that conservation must be abandoned, nor that care should be relaxed lightly—applying flexibility without diagnosis, without monitoring, and without separating fragile objects would be a grave error, and conservators are correct to warn of this. What follows is something more sober: that it is prudent to abandon the fiction that a universal standard exists without material cost.

Conservation has always been a matter of choice. Choosing what is restored, what is exhibited, what is stored, and what is loaned. The climate has merely rendered that choice impossible to conceal, because now every conservation decision carries a visible energy bill, carbon footprint, and opportunity cost. Climate-honest conservation is not that which maintains the perfect bubble at any price, nor that which dismantles it without criteria: it is that which acknowledges that caring for art is a decision regarding finite resources, and that this decision—what, at what cost, for whom—must be taken openly, rather than hidden behind a number that was never sacred.

And there is something, in the end, that is not resignation. Recognising that conservation has a material cost does not degrade art: it returns it to the world. It removes it from the illusion that it exists in a room outside of time and reintegrates it into the place where it truly resides—among the things that a society decides to sustain with its effort, its energy, and its money. Asking oneself what heritage merits that effort, and ensuring that the question is not answered only by those who already possess the means, is one of the most serious conversations the cultural sector can have at present. It is not a comfortable conversation. But that we are beginning to have it, rather than hiding it under a thermostat, is already a way of better caring for what we claim to wish to save.

On open conversation

This text continues my series on infrastructure and sustainability in culture, and brings to heritage the thesis that ethical responsibility is structural and distributed according to the power of each party. If anyone wishes to contribute from the fields of conservation, museology, heritage economics, or climate justice, the notebook remains open.

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