Climate Change and Scent Heritage: The Urgent Need for Capturing and Preserving Olfactory Landscapes in a Changing World
We are excited to share an update on the SCENTINEL Project, a groundbreaking initiative addressing the pressing need to preserve the olfactory landscapes of our heritage, increasingly threatened by climate change. The project’s Steering Committee meeting, hosted on November 22, 2024, marked an important milestone in this endeavor.
Co-funded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage and Global Change (JPI CH), the SCENTINEL Project is coordinated by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Chemical Engineering in Norway.
At its heart, SCENTINEL emphasizes the preservation of scents as an essential element of historical, cultural, and social significance. With climate change posing a severe threat to the existence of these olfactory treasures, the project partners aim to identify, evaluate, protect, preserve, and digitize scents tied to human heritage before they are lost forever.
The Steering Committee unites experts from diverse fields, including neuroscience, cultural heritage, chemical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Together, they are developing and testing an innovative AI-powered methodology to digitize endangered scents, enabling their preservation and ensuring they remain part of our shared cultural identity for future generations.
This cutting-edge approach represents the first step toward creating a secure global platform for storing digital scent data, safeguarding the world’s olfactory heritage in a form accessible for generations to come. SCENTINEL is leading the way in ensuring the smells of the past are not forgotten but cherished and remembered in a rapidly changing world.
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