Laurens Mol

Author directory

2026

Monitoring climate change adaptation (CCA) in the heritage sector, especially in the context of World Heritage (WH) management, requires systematic analyses of policy documents for CCA strategies, a process that is difficult to scale. We ask whether automated retrieval systems can prioritise expert annotation effort: given a CCA concept, can a system rank passages of a management plan so that those an expert would annotate appear near the top, without any in-domain supervision? This objective is formulated as an information retrieval problem with a new benchmark dataset on climate-adaptive heritage management strategies, created from expert-labelled text chunks in official Management Plans of 11 Dutch WH properties. Four retrieval approaches (BM25, a bi-encoder, a dense retriever with reranker, and a cross-encoder reranker) are evaluated and compared. The cross-encoder reranker achieves the strongest performance across labels. An LLM-as-judge evaluation further shows that top-ranked unlabelled chunks could be relevant, suggesting that the existing annotations are precise but not exhaustive. Per-label analysis identifies which concepts are automatically retrievable and which remain beyond the reach of general-purpose retrieval. Our benchmark establishes a foundation for scalable mapping and monitoring of climate change adaptation in the context of heritage management.