World Heritage Review - Volume 2020, Issue 96, 2020

The year 2020 was intended to be a ‘super year’ of decisions for the planet’s biodiversity. Experts and scientists from around the world, as well as members of NGOs and many governments, make an important conceptual review and analysis every ten years of the results and conclusions established by the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity for that period. This year, therefore, policies and strategies to be implemented until 2030 were meant to be determined. The longterm goal is that by 2050 humanity will be living in harmony with nature – that is the hope!

The tide sweeps in fast. Tens of thousands of shorebirds jostle busily on the exposed mudflats, moving ever nearer till they are concentrated on the last few metres before the high tide covers the entire beach. Right at the forefront are the stars of the show – scurrying among the dunlins, plovers and other commoner waders are a few curious and precious Spoon-billed sandpipers or ‘Spoonies’, as they are affectionately known. They are recognized by their remarkable spoon-shaped bills and more hurried feeding behaviour, and there are only a few hundred left in the world. Suddenly the entire flock takes to the air, swings round in a dazzling cloud then heads inland to find high-tide roosts to wait till the tide recedes once again in a couple of hours.

Situated between the 37th and 50th southern parallels, the French Austral Lands and Seas encompass the largest of the few emerged landmasses in the southern Indian Ocean, including the Crozet Archipelago, the Kerguelen Islands and the islands of Saint-Paul and Amsterdam. These territories come under the Terres australes et antarctiques françaises (TAAF), a French overseas administration created in 1955, which exercises missions of sovereignty, preservation of the environment, support for research and supervision of sustainable fisheries. In 2019, these islands, together with their protected maritime zone that constitutes the national nature reserve of the French Austral Lands, became the 50th marine site inscribed on the World Heritage List.

The Dja Faunal Reserve is the only protected area in Cameroon with triple status: wildlife reserve, Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage site. These three designations make Dja unique and subject it to the requirements of the Man and Biosphere Programme (MAB) and the World Heritage Convention.

Biodiversity is the living fabric of our planet. It underpins human well-being in the present and in the future, and its rapid decline threatens nature and people alike. According to the first intergovernmental global biodiversity report released in 2019 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the main global drivers of biodiversity loss are climate change, invasive species, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution and urbanization. Both direct drivers and indirect ones such as social values and behaviours need to be addressed at the same time to halt biodiversity erosion.

The new decade marks an unprecedented time for the conservation community, and indeed the whole world. New targets for safeguarding nature, our planet’s life-support system, will be determined through the development of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. What we do in the next ten to twenty years will undoubtedly set the course of humanity and the planet for generations to come.

Huge fires are blazing through the Pantanal, threatening the highly valuable ecosystem and numerous endangered species. The Rapid Response Facility, a joint initiative of UNESCO and Fauna and Flora International (FFI), is supporting firefighters’ activity in the Pantanal Biosphere Reserve to prevent fires from spreading into the Pantanal Conservation Area World Heritage site.

The Director-General of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay strongly condemned the murder of two employees of the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) on 17 September 2020. The attack occurred at the Adusa post of the entrance to the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, a property inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Thanks to the German Commission’s support of UNESCO’s #SOSAfricanHeritage Fund, seven World Heritage sites from five Eastern African countries have received grants to help withstand the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruptive impact on management and conservation.