When a major earthquake flattens a historic city, two clocks start at once. The first is the survival clock: the 72 hours in which trapped people can still be pulled alive from the rubble. The second is quieter, and it runs much longer, but it never stops. It counts down the slow disappearance of a place's memory. For decades, disaster response paid attention only to the first clock and treated the second as someone else's problem, to be dealt with months later. This article is about that second clock, and about a coordination layer that still does not exist.
Over the past decade, something has quietly changed. Cultural-heritage protection has started to become a formal, coordinated, and increasingly digital part of emergency response, instead of an act of improvised heroism. This matters because the worst damage to heritage often happens after the disaster, not during it: uncoordinated debris removal, the hasty demolition of "unsafe" structures, and the looting of collections that the collapse has just exposed (Tandon, 2023). The story runs from a 2018 agreement between UN search-and-rescue coordinators and heritage bodies, through a new legal category in European civil protection, down to the unglamorous question underneath all of it:
Can the people running a disaster response actually share structured information about heritage, or is it still trapped in free-text notes and PDFs?
That question is where the software discussed throughout was born. CH-RIS (Cultural Heritage Response & Risk Management System) is an open-source Django/PostgreSQL platform, developed with Türkiye's disaster authority AFAD and aligned to the PROCULTHER-NET2 methodology. It digitizes damage assessment, inventory, and logistics for heritage after a disaster. But it is best understood as a lens rather than a product pitch: a way to see where the field's digital layer is strong, where it is missing, and why that matters. Its own story, told below, starts not in a lab but in the rubble of Kahramanmaraş.
Why heritage response is not just a slower USAR
Heritage response is not a softer, slower version of urban search-and-rescue (USAR). It works under different constraints and fails in different ways.
Conventional USAR is organized around one overriding objective, live rescue, and the international system that governs it is built for exactly that. The UN's International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG) tells teams how to classify themselves, divide a stricken city into sectors and worksites, triage structures, and move fast (INSARAG, 2020). Heritage protection has to ride alongside that machinery without slowing it down, while chasing goals the USAR framework was never designed to reach: keeping a damaged fresco attached to a wall that engineers want to pull down, moving collections out before they are looted, and recording where fragments fell so that a collapsed arch can one day be rebuilt.
Three asset types at once
Immovable (buildings), movable (paintings, manuscripts), and intangible heritage, the rituals and crafts tied to a place. Each needs different logic, and most systems ignore the intangible entirely (UNESCO, 2003).
Safety is not value
A structure can be a collapse hazard and irreplaceable at the same time. "Is it safe?" and "what is lost if it goes?" pull in opposite directions, and someone has to arbitrate under time pressure.
The data is dual-use
A precise inventory of high-value objects is exactly the map a looter wants. Protecting heritage data can mean restricting it. That is the opposite of the "share everything" instinct of emergency data (UNESCO, 1954, 1999).
The institutional turn: from goodwill to a named capability
For most of its history, heritage rescue after disasters depended on the initiative of individual curators, archaeologists, and volunteers. The past decade has replaced a good deal of that improvisation with structure.
The 2018 collaboration and the field guide
In 2018, UNESCO, INSARAG, ICCROM, and ICOMOS-ICORP Türkiye began a formal collaboration to embed heritage safeguarding inside urban search-and-rescue operations. Its most tangible output deserves to be far better known: Urban Search and Rescue at Heritage Sites – A Guide for the Field, version 9.0, finalized on 31 March 2023. It is worth attributing correctly. This is not an INSARAG-only product. It is a joint publication of UN OCHA/INSARAG, UNESCO, and ICCROM, edited by Aparna Tandon (ICCROM), with authors including Dr. Zeynep Gül Ünal (ICOMOS-ICORP Türkiye) and Cem Behar (GEA USAR Team) (Tandon, 2023). The guide does something genuinely new. It takes the INSARAG worksite marking system, the spray-painted boxes rescuers use to signal a structure's status, and proposes in its Annex 2 a compatible marking method for heritage sites. This is one of the most digitizable protocol elements in the whole field, because it is already a structured, symbolic language.
The European legal threshold
In April 2025, cultural-heritage protection crossed from practice into law. By its title, Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2025/704 of 10 April 2025 is a general act laying down implementation rules for the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM). But buried in its Annex II is something new: a formally defined response module called "Cultural heritage protection."
The module explicitly covers movable, immovable, and intangible heritage, with tasks that include risk and damage assessment, cultural-heritage emergency management, information management, and the securing and recovery of assets (European Commission, 2025). The significance is hard to overstate. Heritage protection is now a callable capacity within European civil protection, on the same legal footing as high-capacity pumping or urban search-and-rescue. It is no longer a well-meaning add-on.
The operational unit and the methodology
A legal category needs a body to fill it. Germany's KulturGutRetter initiative has been building exactly that: a deployable Cultural Heritage Response Unit, run jointly by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology (LEIZA), and the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW). It was tested at scale in a field exercise in Dresden on 18–19 October 2023 (KulturGutRetter, 2023). Pairing a heritage institute with THW, a classic civil-protection agency, is the whole model in miniature: conservation expertise welded to logistics muscle.
Underneath all of it is a lineage of EU-funded projects whose templates now shape practice: PROMEDHE (2016–2018) → PROCULTHER (2019–2021, which produced the foundational Key Elements of a European Methodology to Address the Protection of Cultural Heritage during Emergencies) → PROCULTHER-NET (2022–2023) → PROCULTHER-NET2, whose final conference was held on 25 March 2026 at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) in Brussels → and now PROCULTHER-4ALL (2026–2028), which pushes the field from a whole-of-government posture toward a whole-of-society one, aligned with the EU's Preparedness Union Strategy (PROCULTHER, 2026). That shift is not just rhetoric. As we will see, it forces a specific and difficult design change on any digital system.
What the digital layer already does well
None of this is theoretical, and the tools are further along than outsiders assume. Four of them deserve attention.
Structured field assessment: ICCROM-FAR
ICCROM's First Aid and Resilience programme built the field's most mature assessment tool. It offers a common methodology that produces customized forms for movable, immovable, and intangible heritage, on Android, iOS, and web, and, crucially, it works offline (ICCROM, 2023). That offline capability is the difference between a tool that works in a disaster zone and one that only works in an office. It was field-tested in Ukraine.
The digital twin: Notre-Dame
The 2019 fire became the flagship case for documenting heritage before catastrophe. Because the cathedral had been laser-scanned beforehand (Tallon's survey, roughly 5 mm accuracy), reconstruction could fuse those point clouds with new surveys into a BIM and a working "digital twin," used to plan and rehearse the physical rebuild, including the analysis of the collapsed nave arch (Scientific Reports, 2023).
Remote sensing, and its honest limit
Satellites give fast, wide-area, and safe assessment (Cuca, Zaina, & Tapete, 2023). But when analysts ground-truthed 28 sites in Daraa, Syria, they found significant discrepancies against the remote-sensing results. That is the proof that orbit and fieldwork are complements, not substitutes. Satellites see collapse and places no one can reach. Only people on the ground see interior damage and looting.
Crowdsourcing: Backup Ukraine
The whole-of-society idea already has a working proof. Backup Ukraine (UNESCO, Blue Shield Denmark, and Virtue) used the consumer app Polycam to let citizens 3D-model monuments into a permanent archive (UNESCO, 2022). It shows both the reach of the approach and the problem underneath it: how far can you trust data from non-specialists?
The gap nobody has closed: coordination and interoperability
The methodology has matured. The coordination layer has not.
Excellent tools exist, but they do not talk to each other, and the systems that run actual disasters have nowhere to put heritage information. Consider how INSARAG coordinates a real response. Its INSARAG Coordination and Management System (ICMS) is built on Esri's ArcGIS: a central hub, dashboards, and structured Survey123 field forms for worksite triage, worksite reports, victim extrication, and resource requests, all linked from the Virtual OSOCC that international teams use to self-coordinate (INSARAG, 2024). It is a genuinely capable system. But its structured forms contain no cultural-heritage field type. When a rescue team finds a historic structure in the rubble, there is no structured channel to pass that on to a heritage specialist. The information survives, if it survives at all, as a free-text note.
The protocol for live rescue is fully digitized. The protocol for heritage is a spray-painted symbol in an annex to a PDF.
This is the gap CH-RIS is built to address, and naming it clarifies what the system actually contributes. Its distinctive part is not damage assessment, which the ICCROM-FAR app already does well. It is the operational and logistics layer that sits above assessment: assigning missions to specialist teams with status tracking, and following movable artifacts through an end-to-end transfer chain, all organized in a hierarchy that mirrors INSARAG's own sectorization logic (Sector → Worksite → Site → Building → Asset). The comparison below is not about competition. It is about a division of labour.
| ICCROM-FAR App | INSARAG ICMS | CH-RIS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Damage & risk assessment | Live-rescue coordination | Heritage operations & coordination |
| Heritage-aware? | Yes (all three types) | No (no heritage field) | Yes (all three types) |
| Mission assignment | Limited | Yes (rescue) | Yes (heritage teams) |
| Logistics / artifact transfer | No | Resource requests | End-to-end tracking |
| Methodology | ICCROM-FAR | INSARAG Guidelines | PROCULTHER-NET2 |
| Maturity / field status | Deployed, field-tested | Operational worldwide | Prototype; first tests on Feb 2026 workshop data |
The opportunity here is interoperability, not replacement. Picture a heritage system that can hand a structured, INSARAG-compatible data profile to ICMS, pull in remote-sensing damage layers from services like Copernicus, and export its assessments in the ICCROM-FAR format. The deeper problem is that shared, machine-readable schemas barely exist. Take the PROCULTHER templates that increasingly define the field: the ten standardized forms tested by 80 experts from 20 countries at the AFAD–Italian Civil Protection exercise in Bursa in February 2026 (KulturGutRetter, 2026). They have no published JSON Schema and no open API. Meanwhile, the mature heritage-data standards that do exist are being ignored on the emergency side, among them the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (ISO 21127) and the open-source Arches platform built by the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund (Getty Conservation Institute, n.d.). The building blocks are lying on the ground, waiting to be assembled.
From Kahramanmaraş to CH-RIS: how this software came to be
I did not arrive at this problem through theory. In the aftermath of the 6 February 2023 earthquakes, I served in the coordination of search-and-rescue operations in Kahramanmaraş, one of the hardest-hit provinces. The commitment I witnessed there was extraordinary. Teams from across Türkiye and around the world worked around the clock, and their skill and courage saved countless lives. What the sheer scale of that response also made clear, to everyone living it, was how hard coordination becomes when hundreds of teams converge on a shattered city at once. Assignments, situational updates, and shared awareness all need to move faster than voice and paper allow. This is not a shortcoming of any team or institution; it is the inherent difficulty of coordinating a response this large under this much pressure. Experiencing that firsthand is what convinced me that the most useful thing I could add was not another pair of hands in the rubble, but a way to strengthen the connective tissue between the people already doing the rescuing.
Out of those lessons I built Koordinatör ("Coordinator"), software to manage the coordination of USAR and general SAR teams. Not only for earthquakes, but for floods, landslides, missing-person searches, and other kinds of event. The goal was simple and stubborn: give coordinators one structured operational picture instead of a wall of radio traffic and notebooks.
My work on CH-RIS began at a PROCULTHER-NET2 workshop in Bursa on 15–16 April 2025, organized by AFAD and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which assessed the effects of the 6 February 2023 earthquakes on cultural heritage and closed with a field exercise at the I. Murad Hüdavendigâr complex that combined rescue operations with artifact-preservation protocols. There it was the same coordination problem I already knew from Kahramanmaraş, only now with heritage layered on top. So I adapted Koordinatör toward the cultural-heritage mission and built CH-RIS. It is the same coordination logic, but now it speaks the language of heritage: sectors and worksites, yes, but also sites, buildings, movable assets, and the intangible practices tied to them.
The February 2026 workshop in Bursa gave me the raw material for the first real test. That event was not about CH-RIS. Its focus was the European damage and impact assessment tool, worked through by 80 experts from 20 countries. But it produced something valuable: real, structured assessment-form data. I took those forms and used them to run CH-RIS's first tests, feeding genuine field data through the system instead of invented examples. That is where you find out which of your assumptions survive contact with real data. Several of mine did not, and the tool is better for it.
I also want to be clear about what CH-RIS is not. It is not an official output or deliverable of PROCULTHER-NET2 or PROCULTHER-4ALL. Those projects were invaluable to it as a source of field experience, methodological grounding, and inspiration, but the software itself is an independent, personal effort, and any shortcomings in it are mine alone.
Beyond that, I want to be honest about where it stands. CH-RIS began as an experiment. It is not a finished answer to a hard problem. It is a working hypothesis about where the missing layer should sit, and it will only get better with feedback from people who have actually been in the field, and from the academics and professionals who have thought about this far longer than I have. That is not a disclaimer. It is an invitation.
Have you worked in disaster response, USAR, or heritage protection?
I am actively looking for critique from field responders, conservators, coordinators, and researchers. Your experience is the input this is missing.
The hard problems that remain
The obstacles that matter most are not about better forms. They are structural.
Where this is heading
The direction is clear even where the destination is not. Cultural-heritage protection is being institutionalized on three fronts at once: legally, through the EU module; operationally, through units like KulturGutRetter; and methodologically, through the PROCULTHER lineage and the joint INSARAG, UNESCO, and ICCROM field guide. Remote sensing has moved from an "experimental support tool" to a structural component of heritage governance (Heritage, 2026), and machine learning now dominates the research frontier of post-disaster damage detection (Cuca et al., 2023). The pieces are arriving.
What has not arrived is the connective tissue. The most valuable thing a digital system can add right now is not another assessment app. It is the coordination and interoperability layer that lets the existing pieces work as one: shared schemas, an INSARAG-compatible heritage data profile, a closed loop from remote sensing to the field and back, and a trust model that can hold both the certified expert and the citizen with a phone. This is a less glamorous ambition than a smarter drone or a prettier map. It is also the one that decides whether, the next time the ground shakes, the second clock gets managed or improvised all over again.
The bottom line
None of this is abstract to me. I have watched good teams lose time because the information they needed was stuck in someone else's notebook. The encouraging part is that the field finally has real structure. Heritage protection is now a legal capacity in European civil protection, there is a field guide written in the language of search-and-rescue, the assessment methodology is solid, and tools to document and even rehearse reconstruction already exist. What is still missing is the part that connects them. We have good instruments that do not yet play together. Heritage does not get a second rescue window, so the question is not whether we can build one more clever tool. It is whether we will finally build the boring, essential layer that lets the tools we already have work as one.
Frequently asked questions
Help shape an experimental project
CH-RIS is open source and still evolving. If this resonates, or if you think it is wrong, say so. Star the repository, open an issue, or share this article with a colleague who coordinates in the field.
View the CH-RIS repositoryReferences
Cuca, B., Zaina, F., & Tapete, D. (2023). Monitoring of damages to cultural heritage across Europe using remote sensing and Earth observation: Assessment of scientific and grey literature. Remote Sensing, 15(15), 3748. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15153748
European Commission. (2025). Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2025/704 of 10 April 2025 laying down rules for the implementation of Decision No 1313/2013/EU on a Union Civil Protection Mechanism (Annex II: Cultural heritage protection module). EUR-Lex. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec_impl/2025/704/oj/eng
Getty Conservation Institute. (n.d.). Arches: An open-source data management platform for cultural heritage. https://www.archesproject.org/
Heritage. (2026). Satellite remote sensing for cultural heritage protection: The Consensus platform and AI-assisted bibliometric analysis of scientific and grey literature (2010–2025). Heritage, 9(4), 149. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage9040149
International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM). (2016). A guide to risk management of cultural heritage. ICCROM & Government of Canada. https://www.iccrom.org/sites/default/files/Guide-to-Risk-Managment_English.pdf
International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM). (2023). First aid and resilience for cultural heritage in times of crisis (FAR): Damage and risk assessment app and Ukraine field report. https://www.iccrom.org/
International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG). (2020). INSARAG guidelines (Vol. II, Manual B). United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. https://www.insarag.org/guidelines/
International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG). (2024). INSARAG Coordination and Management System (ICMS). United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. https://icms-insarag.hub.arcgis.com/
KulturGutRetter. (2023). Large-scale field test in Dresden, 18–19 October 2023. German Archaeological Institute (DAI), LEIZA & THW. https://www.kulturgutretter.org/en/
KulturGutRetter. (2026). Improving the European tool to assess damage to cultural heritage in emergencies: Bursa workshop, 10–12 February 2026. https://www.kulturgutretter.org/en/
PROCULTHER. (2026). PROCULTHER-NET2 final conference and the launch of PROCULTHER-4ALL. https://www.proculther.eu/
Scientific Reports. (2023). Faceting the post-disaster built heritage reconstruction process within the digital twin framework for Notre-Dame de Paris. Scientific Reports, 13. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32504-9
Tandon, A. (Ed.). (2023). Urban search and rescue at heritage sites: A guide for the field (Version 9.0). UN OCHA/INSARAG, UNESCO & ICCROM. insarag.org
UNESCO. (1954). Convention for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict (Hague Convention). unesco.org
UNESCO. (1999). Second protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954. unesco.org
UNESCO. (2003). Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage. ich.unesco.org
UNESCO. (2022). Backup Ukraine: A partnership with Blue Shield Denmark and Virtue to 3D-document cultural heritage. unesco.org
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