News

Funded by the Flanders-UNESCO Trustfund (FUT), UNESCO starts the development of an online geographic information system for World Heritage Over a thousand properties are currently inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, almost half of which are located in Europe and North America. To preserve the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of World Heritage sites, potential impacts need to be ...

World Heritage forests: Carbon sinks under pressure, a report by UNESCO, World Resources Institute (WRI) and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released today, provides the first global scientific assessment of greenhouse gas emissions and sequestration by forests in UNESCO World Heritage sites. It reveals that despite substantial carbon stored and absorbed by forests ...

From September to October 2021, five sub-regional meetings were organized with African site managers from Eastern, Central, Southern, Western and Northern Africa to elect the members of the Interim Committee of the African Site Managers Network. 15 members were elected (3 members per sub-region) to work as the Interim Committee to ensure the official establishment of the African Site Managers ...

On 15 October 2021, the UNESCO/China Youth Development Foundation Mercedes-Benz Star Fund “Conservation and Management of World Heritage Sites in China” meeting took place in Songtao Miao Autonomous County, Guizhou Province, China. It reviewed the achievements of Phase III of the project and launched a new Phase IV. Shahbaz Khan, Director of the UNESCO Office in Beijing, expressed his ...

UNESCO is launching a call for UNESCO designated sites including Biosphere Reserves, UNESCO Global Geoparks and World Heritage sites, as well as elements of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to benefit from the capacity building support of the UNESCO Earth Network. Earlier this month, a call for volunteer experts including young people was launched. The programme aims at matching volunteer ...

An ambitious project using cutting edge environmental DNA, known as eDNA, to understand the richness of biodiversity of UNESCO’s marine World Heritage sites launches today.  It will involve the collection by scientists and local residents of genetic material from waste, mucus or the cells of fish from across select marine World Heritage sites, with the aim of monitoring fish, including ...

Part 1 of the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 15) gathered countries to negotiate towards the adoption of a new and transformative global deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 (post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework) due in 2022. The hybrid meeting held from 11 to 15 October 2021 was hosted by China from the city of ...

As part of the Sankofa Project, sponsored by the French Embassy in Kumasi, Ghana - the revision and 2021 edition of Asante Traditional Buildings has been published. The revised publication aims to regenerate interest in the traditional architecture found at the Asante Traditional Buildings (Ghana) UNESCO World Heritage site and motivate students and researchers towards sustainable ...

UNESCO World Heritage Centre met on Wednesday 6 October 2021 with His Excellency Mr Carlos-Edmilson Marques Vieira, following his nomination in July 2021 as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Guinea-Bissau to France, UNESCO and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). This meeting provided an opportunity to update the Ambassador on current UNESCO’s initiatives ...

The Third Cycle of Periodic Reporting (2018 – 2024), a global World Heritage conservation monitoring exercise carried out in six-year cycles, carries on this September with reporting in the Latin America and the Caribbean region.  World Heritage site managers and national focal points of the 147 World Heritage properties (101 cultural, 38 natural and 8 mixed sites) in the Latin America and ...