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Tijuana Estuary
Places
Explore our cultural and natural heritage sites across the globe
Preserving Legacies is partnered with 10 cultural and natural heritage sites in 2023. These places of cultural significance, explored below, represent different heritage typologies, like archeological sites and living agricultural landscapes, and different climate threats, like sea level rise and extreme heat. While this diverse first cohort spans continents, cultures, and climate impacts, they all share a deep commitment to learn, connect, and build something new together.
Primary Sites
In the first year of Preserving Legacies, our two primary sites will go through a more robust program to link climate science and site conservation by enabling access to locally downscaled climate change models and organize a community-led workshop of the sites’ climate vulnerability as well as impacts on local communities.
Cadet Sites
In the first year of Preserving Legacies, eight cadet sites have been chosen to fully engage in climate heritage training and a peer-to-peer learning experience. Site custodians from these sites will shadow the full process at Petra and the Rice Terraces, including attending their workshops, to better prepare for their own assessments in 2024.
USA / Mexico
Tijuana Estuary
The Tijuana Estuary is the largest intact coastal wetland remaining in the region. It is a place where the United States, Mexico, and the indigenous Kumeyaay nations come together along an international border. The estuary is in the U.S. portion of the Tijuana River Watershed, which includes Border Field State Park and the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve. Climate impacts are experienced disproportionately by marginalized communities on both sides of the border, and these occur in the face of stressors such as sedimentation, flooding, marine debris, and degraded water quality. These threaten natural and cultural resources, and also compromise recreational, aesthetic, and sense-of-place ecosystem services. The Tijuana Estuary represents a space for developing solutions to these challenges - solutions that involve community collaboration and the human dimension of conservation and restoration, enabling conditions for climate resilience in social-ecological systems.