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A wildfire burned vast areas of Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain, historical landmarks and the nearly 200-year-old Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town that houses precious collections of Africa’s history. Similarly, Brazil’s National Museum, founded in 1818, was gutted, destroying some of Latin America’s priceless collections of scientific and cultural artifacts. 

It may be fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tropical depression floods, tsunami and volcanic eruptions – they all represent a clear and present danger to the world’s memory encoded in documentary collections that may be held in libraries, archives, museums and other holding places.

This publication documents how memory institutions from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe as well as Latin America and the Caribbean have come to terms with, and are putting in place measures to reduce or manage, the risk that natural and man-made disasters pose to their documentary holdings. Possibly up to 80 per cent of audiovisual collections scattered at various research institutions or cultural bodies are not adequately safeguarded. 

These experiences and measures include the elaboration of robust emergency preparedness plans and forging equally robust national and international cooperation for the preservation and accessibility of documentary heritage. 

In this way, policy makers and memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums, etc.), along with the support of national and regional committees of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme, can make the preservation of documentary heritage a key feature of sustainable development.