Climate Inheritance is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of “heritage” and “world” in the Anthropocene. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites—from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands—have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis.

In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, DESIGN EARTH casts World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckages of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism. The harms and possibilities of such inheritances are narrated in drawing triptychs and mythologies to bequeath other worlds and values that are urgent and necessary. The book includes three framing essays by Lucia Allais, David Gissen, and Colin Sterling and Rodney Harrison.