World Heritage Review - Volume 2021, Issue 100, 2022

The World Heritage Convention was adopted in 1972. The associated framework, mechanisms and instruments have evolved, however, and they continue to develop in response to issues affecting the Outstanding Universal Value of the World Heritage properties.

In combatting climate change, society must pull hard on two planet-size levers: reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing carbon sequestration. Many economic sectors can mitigate climate change only through the first of those, but with forests we can work both levers at once. We can—and indeed must— simultaneously reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and maintain or increase the carbon captured by forests. This is the promise of forests in combatting climate change.

A core idea of World Heritage is to ensure that the places most iconic and valuable to humanity outlast all crises and are conserved across generations. Today we face perhaps our biggest challenge yet, an environmental crisis unprecedented in human history, and at its centre is climate change.

Climate change is the fastest-growing threat to World Heritage globally. From the canals of Venice in Italy to the forests of the Tasmanian wilderness in Australia, World Heritage is at risk.

In recent years, South-East Asia – a region home to 42 World Heritage properties within nine of eleven countries and containing numerous invaluable natural and cultural heritage assets – has been suffering increasingly from unprecedented natural hazards, accelerated by climate turbulence and human activity.

We are living at a time when we need to act decisively to produce global agreements on sustainability, social inclusion and poverty reduction, climate resilience and the conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity. From a global perspective, the prevailing trajectories of economic growth have put at risk the survival of at least two of the systems that sustain human well-being on the planet: climate and biological diversity. There is a clear scientific consensus (IPCC 2021, 2018; IPBES 2019) that indicates an alarming planetary risk due to the deterioration of these two systems and points to human activity as the main factor responsible.

During its extended 44th session, held online and chaired by China from Fuzhou from 16 to 31 July 2021, the World Heritage Committee examined nominations submitted in 2020, when the session had to be postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2021.

The World Heritage Committee, during its 44th session from 16 to 31 July 2021, decided to remove Salonga National Park (Democratic Republic of the Congo) from the List of World Heritage in Danger because of improvements in its state of conservation.

A new publication Visitors Count! has been launched to help assess the value of tourism in protected areas. This set of guidelines, published by UNESCO and the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), puts forward a standard methodology for evaluating the impact of protected areas on the local economy.