Rising sea levels, the increasing frequency and intensity of storms, desertification and other intensifying impacts pose both obvious and unprecedented challenges to the cultural and natural heritage of humankind. Cultural heritage also promises to be an important part of the solution to climate change, including the science of learning from cultural heritage/archaeology about climate variability and human adaptation to it through time. Historic preservation necessarily involves the conservation of existing resources (both tangible and intangible) and their adaptive reuse and recycling for the future. As concerns mount about climate change, environmental degradation and the unsustainable consumption of irreplaceable natural resources, preservation’s essential paradigm of sustainable stewardship in a context of growth and progress is increasingly important. At the same time, for various political and geographic reasons, attention to the heritage and climate change question has often been more robust abroad when compared to US practice. This combination of factors means that international collaboration on climate change is urgently needed – thus making it an initial focus of the US/ICOMOS KnowledgeExchange initiative. Key goals of this Knowledge Community will include helping the US cultural heritage community benchmark itself against international best practices in areas like: Monitoring and reporting; Mitigation and “Corrective actions” like management, adaptation, and risk management.