The vision of the Programme is to increase knowledge and the resilience of our cultural heritage in the face of twenty-first-century challenges.

By 2099, our cultural heritage - old, fragile, incomplete, non-homogenous and around us in large but decreasing quantities - will have faced many challenges ranging from intensive use for leisure, education and wellbeing to climate change impacts.

Significantly, with the increasing demand for sustainable re-use of materials across a large swathe of society and the economy, heritage science can increase our understanding of how to extend and predict the life of materials for continuing cycles of re-use.

The Programme objectives are:

• To strengthen the fragmented heritage science base
• To engage with a broad spectrum of heritage stakeholders
• To address research challenges of significance beyond narrow institutional interest
• To build capacity through interdisciplinary research projects and by training young researchers