World Heritage sites now at risk

New York. Some 31 natural and cultural World Heritage sites in 29 countries across the world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, a new report released by the United Nations has found.

The World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate report documents climate impacts including increasing temperatures, melting glaciers, rising seas, intensifying weather events, worsening droughts and longer wildfire seasons, at iconic tourism sites such as Venice, Stonehenge and the Galapagos Islands.

It also covers other World Heritage sites such as South Africa’s Cape Floral Kingdom; the port city of Cartagena, Colombia; and Shiretoko National Park in Japan, the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said in a press release.

“World governments, the private sector and tourists all need to coordinate their efforts to reduce carbon emissions and to protect the world’s most treasured cultural and natural resources from the impact of tourism activities,” said Elisa Tonda, head of Unep’s Responsible Industry and Value Chains Unit.

“Policies to decouple tourism from natural resource impacts, carbon emissions and environmental harm will engage a responsible private sector and promote change in tourists’ behaviour to realise the sectors’ potential in some of the world’s most visited places,” she added.

In addition to Unep, the report was prepared by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

Because World Heritage sites must have ‘Outstanding Universal Value,’ the report recommends that the World Heritage Committee consider the risk of prospective sites becoming degraded by climate change before they add them to the list.

In particular, the report highlights the urgent need to identify the World Heritage sites that are most vulnerable to climate change, and to implement policies and provide resources to increase resilience at those sites.

In addition, the report urges increased global efforts to meet the Paris Agreement climate change pledges in order to preserve World Heritage sites for future generations. “Globally, we need to better understand, monitor and address climate change threats to World Heritage sites,” said Mechtild Rössler, director of Unesco’s World Heritage Centre. “As the report’s findings underscore, achieving the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature rise to a level well below 2 degrees Celsius is vitally important to protecting our World Heritage for current and future generations.”

The report also recommends engaging the tourism sector in efforts to manage and protect vulnerable sites in the face of climate change, and to educate visitors about climate threats. “Climate change is affecting World Heritage sites across the globe,” said Adam Markham, lead author of the report and deputy director of the Climate and Energy Programme at UCS.

“Some Easter Island statues are at risk of being lost to the sea because of coastal erosion. Many of the world’s most important coral reefs, including in the islands of New Caledonia in the western Pacific, have suffered unprecedented coral bleaching linked to climate change this year. Climate change could eventually even cause some World Heritage sites to lose their status,” he added. The report includes a complete list of World Heritage sites that are at risk. 

Meanwhile, the environment is deteriorating faster than previously thought, making it imperative that governments act now to reverse the worst trends, says the most authoritative study the United Nations has ever published on the state of the planet’s health. Regional Assessments is a compilation of six separate reports, which provide highly detailed examinations of the environmental issues affecting each of the world’s six regions: the Pan-European region, North America, Asia and the Pacific, West Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa, the Unep said in a press release.

Published ahead of the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi from 23-27 May, which involved 1,203 scientists, hundreds of scientific institutions and more than 160 governments, find that the world shares a host of common environmental threats that are rapidly intensifying in many parts of the world.

Across the planet, climate change, the loss of biodiversity, land degradation and water scarcity are growing problems that need to be urgently addressed if the world is to achieve the goals set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the studies find.

“Today, thanks to this report, we now know more about the state of the world’s environment than ever before,” said Unep executive director Achim Steiner. “It is essential that we understand the pace of environmental change that is upon us.”

The assessments find that there is still time to tackle many of the worst impacts of environmental change, such as the damage to marine ecosystems and the rising level of air pollution, which has become one of the world’s most widespread environmental health risks.

As one of the first areas of the world to experience the impacts of climate change, the Arctic region serves as a barometer for change in the rest of the world. Warming in the Arctic has increased at twice the global average since 1980.

The largest contributions to global glacier ice loss during the early 21st century were from glaciers in Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and the periphery of the Greenland ice sheet, as well as in the Southern Andes and Asian mountains. Together these areas account for more than 80 per cent of the total ice loss.

The 30 centimetres of sea level rise off New York City since 1900 likely expanded Hurricane Sandy’s flood area by approximately 65 square kilometres, flooding the homes of more than 80,000 additional people in New York and New Jersey alone.

The prospect for impacts such as these to worsen in both the near and long term constitutes a priority issue for North America. Last year, the Asia-Pacific continued to be the world’s most disaster prone region. About 41 per cent of all natural disasters reported over the last two decades occurred in the Asia-Pacific region, which also accounted for 91 per cent of the world’s deaths attributable to natural disasters in the last century.

The main driver for accelerating domestic material consumption is the expanding middle class. The size of the global middle class is projected to increase from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 4.9 billion in 2030 with most of this growth coming from Asia.

In the Latin American and Caribbean region, most of the cities in the region for which data are available have concentrations of particulate matter (PM) above World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines.

The region’s urban population increased by more than 35 million people between 2010 and 2015, and is expected to climb to a total of 567 million persons by 2025. More than 100 million people already live in areas where they are at risk from air pollution.

(UN News Centre)