8. Resilience

Heritage resilience is the ability of a heritage place, structure or value to experience impacts or disturbance while retaining the inherent heritage value for which it has been recognised. Poor community awareness and a lack of appreciation of heritage values are recognised as key threats to the Region’s heritage values and their resilience.⁵ Communication and interpretation of heritage values are important drivers of resilience: they make heritage accessible to the community and engender community support and heritage protection. 

Since 2019, the improved focus on social and economic elements of heritage resilience has continued at both a national and state level. These elements include the importance of collaboration and partnerships, sustainable tourism and adaptive re-use, and engaged and appreciative communities. Management of heritage values is hindered by a lack of publicly available data on threats and impacts to heritage, which would provide an early warning and allow more effective management. The current level of resourcing for heritage protection across Australia, and in Queensland, is also limiting the ability of any level of government to effectively meet standard heritage protection requirements.¹⁹⁶⁴

More broadly, loss of knowledge and tradition and incremental damage continue to impair the resilience of intangible cultural knowledge across many of the world’s indigenous cultures, including in the Region (Section 4.3). However, on a Region-wide scale, Indigenous heritage values continue to experience heightened awareness and reconnection. Since 2019, the Reef’s Traditional Owners have continued to access Sea Country and strengthen their capacity for natural and cultural resource management (Sections 4.3 and 5.9.1). A new strategy to guide management, adopted since 2019, is the Reef 2050 Traditional Owner Implementation Plan.¹¹²⁰ The plan details actions to achieve Traditional Owners’ aspirations for the Reef as part of the Reef 2050 Plan (Box 10.2). It includes specific objectives and actions across six work areas: climate change, land-based activities, water-based activities, partnerships and capacity, knowledge systems and investment.