14.1 Introduction
In 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) held its World Heritage Convention (WHC) in Paris. The fifty-year anniversary of that event was celebrated in November 2022, at a conference in Delphi (Greece).Footnote 1 The first site to be “inscribed” as a World Heritage (WH) site was a biodiversity site (the Galapagos Islands, inscribed in 1978), soon followed in 1980 by another – Socotra (Yemen) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.Footnote 2 The year 2022 also marked another fiftieth anniversary celebration in Stockholm, of the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment, with the theme of “a healthy planet for the prosperity of all – our responsibility, our opportunity.”Footnote 3 This showed how biodiversity and sustainable development have grown as global concerns facing the urgent need for climate change action. Considering that many of the WH sites are also key biodiversity areas (KBAs) that are critical to the survival of several rare species of flora and fauna, an integrated and nexus governance approach is required to address the synergies, as well as common and multiscale threats to both WH and biodiversity.Footnote 4
This chapter aims to explore issues facing WH sites, especially relating to biodiversity in the MENA region. It discusses the challenges to the effective conservation and protection of heritage sites in the region and the need for a holistic approach to conservation and biodiversity. It draws upon data and publications of the WHC and the limited academic literature on biodiversity issues in WH. It examines the shift in WHC priorities toward a more balanced WH list and its actions to identify endangered properties and even delete some from the list. This reinforces the responsibilities of state parties (SPs) who have signed the convention (most of the UN membership) to give legal protection to sites and strengthen site management and regulatory controls.
The chapter demonstrates that greater attention is now being given to biodiversity and ecosystem elements in a changing policy environment about climate action, while recognizing that existing biodiversity protection often overlaps with WH protection. The chapter also aims to offer an educational resource on WH for environmental law programs and students. After this introduction, Section 14.2 discusses the evolution of WH ideas and institutions in the past fifty years. Section 14.3 examines the biodiversity challenges facing WH in the MENA region, Section 14.4 unpacks legal and regulatory challenges facing a holistic approach to conservation and biodiversity in the MENA region. Section 14.5 offers conclusions and recommendations on advancing biodiversity WH protection for the MENA region.
14.2 UNESCO World Heritage Fifty Years on: Issues of Biodiversity and Sustainable Development
UNESCO was founded in 1946 in a time of global recovery after the Second World War, and the idea of WH followed from the need to repair monuments and cultural heritage.Footnote 5 The WHC, and its Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection of the Cultural and Natural Heritage of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), manage the process for “inscribing” or listing WH sites, which are classified as either cultural or natural, or a mixture of both. Of the ten criteria defining OUV, the first six refer to cultural heritage and the last four to natural heritage. Natural WH sites are often chosen for their scenic beauty but may also be iconic for biodiversity and conservation, while biodiversity issues can be important for all WH sites.
WH listings reveal much about the changing geopolitics and power relationships of the world and UNESCO (see Table 14.1).Footnote 6 A Eurocentric bias is shown by the fact that Europe and North America (classed as a single region in WHC statistics) have nearly half of the WH sites, and some individual SPs have large numbers of them, headed by Italy (58), China (56), and Germany (51). Since 1994 the WHC’s global strategy has sought to develop a more representative, balanced, and credible WH list, with new frameworks for identifying the prized OUV requirement.Footnote 7 Both cultural and natural WH sites have biodiversity aspects, and experts have recognized their importance for the good management of both.Footnote 8
Table 14.1 Distribution of WH sites by region and type
| Zone/region | Cultural | Natural | Mixed | Total | Percentage | State parties with inscribed properties |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 54 | 39 | 5 | 98 | 8.5 | 35 |
| Arab states | 80 | 5 | 3 | 88 | 7.6 | 18 |
| Asia and Pacific | 195 | 70 | 12 | 277 | 24.0 | 36 |
| Europe and North America | 468 | 66 | 11 | 545 | 47.2 | 50 |
| Latin America and Caribbean | 100 | 38 | 8 | 146 | 12.7 | 28 |
| Total | 897 | 218 | 39 | 1,154 | 100 | 167 |
WH sites have high visibility for promoting tourism and conservation protection.Footnote 9 Most foreign direct investment into them comes from international tour operators, hotel chains, and airlines, and in providing transport infrastructure and creating local jobs, but often without much other benefit to local people. Domestic and international tourism make WH a major vehicle of cultural exchange, with filming and fashion photography in particular contributing to the OUV of a WH site. The SPs to the WHC are well aware of the benefits for tourism and wider cultural influence, but WH sites come at a price to the SP, which is responsible for protecting and managing them with legislation and appropriate resources. Many WH cultural sites are deteriorating from the impacts of tourism, while natural sites are especially vulnerable to damage to their biodiversity. In 1999, the International Cultural Tourism Charter sought to improve management and reduce the adverse impacts of mass tourism,Footnote 10 through the tourism industry working together with the conservation and local community. While the COVID-19 pandemic reduced tourist numbers and closed some sites, it may have eased pressure on some ecosystems but also caused significant revenue loss, and damaging and illegal activities grow when there are fewer staff to prevent them.
The institutions and conservation concepts for WH have evolved significantly over the past fifty years. The official advisors to the WHC in the cultural category are the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural PropertyFootnote 11 and the International Council on Monuments and Sites.Footnote 12 The latter, founded in 1965, comprises some 110 national committees, 28 international scientific committees, and some 10,000 experts. For natural WH sites and biodiversity, the official WHC advisor is the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN),Footnote 13 founded in 1948, with a membership of over 1,400 governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and drawing upon the services of some 16,000 experts.
The institutional landscape around biodiversity and conservation has developed further since the WHC in 1972, with more international actors created, notably the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)Footnote 14 and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD),Footnote 15 which entered into force in 1993. The WHC is now one of eight key international biodiversity-related conventions, but it is unique among them because its remit is both natural and cultural heritage. The IUCN produces “red lists” of threatened species and ecosystems, and recognizes many site categories beyond WH, with its World Commission on Protected Areas but one among its various agencies. The Global Biodiversity Framework now assesses the conservation prospects of WH sites as a test for the broader success of conservation worldwide.Footnote 16 Natural WH sites encompass most major ecosystems, and within the cultural category cities contain historic urban landscapes and green space that embody a long and intimate relationship between people, culture, and their natural environment, often reflecting land use methods that enhance biological diversity.
The WHC became part of a more complex global governance reality when in 2015 the UN General Assembly adopted its Sustainable Development Agenda to the year 2030, identifying seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and seen as a “critical juncture” in the global policy agenda.Footnote 17 Global wealth inequalities, political conflicts, an accelerating climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic have all combined to reduce resources, change relationships, and bring in new actors. A more decentred political theory of the nation state has emerged, which sees the state less as sovereign and monolithic and rather as a creation of contingent actions of different groups and individuals, diverse beliefs about public authority, and contending (and perhaps unstable) cultural traditions and practices.Footnote 18 These changed attitudes have an effect upon how WH is seen and protected.
WH appears in the Sustainable Development Agenda under SDG 11 (sustainable cities), target 11.4: “Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage.”Footnote 19 Biodiversity affects both the natural and cultural categories of WH sites. Natural WH sites make up less than 1 percent of the earth’s surface but more than a fifth of mapped global species richness, and a fifth of cultural WH sites are located in KBAs threatened by global climate change. The IUCN, in 2021, found that the deterioration of WH site conditions was of “significant concern” in 30 percent of natural sites and critical for a further 7 percent.Footnote 20
Target 11.4 of SDG 11 is only one of the many targets that have been set for the SDGs, but WH is also relevant to other elements of the Sustainable Development Agenda, which include SDG 13 (climate change), SDG 14 (life below water), SDG 15 (life on land), and SDG 17 (partnerships for goals). The WHC warned that climate change was a significant threat to its properties nearly twenty years ago, and the Paris Agreement (2015) on climate change saw WH sites as key focal points for building clean and resilient futures, fulfilling a role as climate change observatories.Footnote 21 SDG 14 marks out marine and coastal ecosystems in WH sites as playing a crucial role in climate regulation, storing as they do an estimated 15 percent of the world’s blue carbon assets.Footnote 22 SDG 15’s mission is to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss” – all of which relate to WH sites.
Furthermore, the WHC is one of eight key international biodiversity-related conventions, being unique in dealing with both natural and cultural heritage, which contribute to conserving ecosystem integrity and biodiversity. While making up less than 1 percent of the earth’s surface, they harbor over a fifth of mapped global species richness, and a fifth of cultural WH sites are located in KBAs. These supposedly highly protected sites are, however, not immune from the threat of global climate change and pressures from human activities, so SPs are now being encouraged to integrate WH into National Biodiversity Strategies.Footnote 23
Biodiversity appears as the last of the ten criteria (x) for WH site selection, which was defined as containing “the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation.”Footnote 24 In the present century, climate change and human population growth have raised the importance of biodiversity issues, and more sites are joining the tentative list under criterion (x), while climate change continues to degrade the OUV, integrity, and authenticity of many WH sites. State tourism and development strategies and site visitor management plans often fail to take account of climate change impacts, while site managers may lack financial resources and expertise.Footnote 25 Aspects of biodiversity and WH in the specific challenging circumstances of the MENA region are discussed in Section 14.3.
14.3 Biodiversity and WH in the MENA Region
The MENA region is usually considered to cover twenty or twenty-one countries but there is no generally agreed definition. The WHC places it within its “Arab states” region, which is divided into three distinct subregions: the Gulf (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen), the Maghreb (Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia), and the Middle East (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, and Syria).Footnote 26 This chapter also includes a discussion of examples from Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. The hugely varied MENA region has country populations ranging from Egypt, with some 100 million people, to Djibouti, with fewer than a million. The largest country by land area is Algeria at 381,740 km2 (mostly desert); the smallest is the Gaza Strip at 360 km2 and a population density of over 5,000 people per km2, contrasted by Mauritania (mostly desert) with fewer than four. The region has one of the world’s most rapidly expanding populations, which are increasingly found in urban areas and may be displaced by conflict and climate change. Lebanon has the highest net international emigration at forty emigrants per 1,000 population, with many more people leaving than entering. MENA’s Gulf states are among the richest countries in the world, while other countries in the region are fragile or failing states with extreme levels of poverty and unemployment.Footnote 27
The WHC has eighty-two sites in its Arab States region. Of these, the vast majority (seventy-four) are in the cultural category, including some of the oldest continuously occupied towns in the world, and the physical legacies of Carthaginian, Greco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian, and Islamic civilizations. The natural or mixed sites are much fewer in number (currently five natural and three mixed), and substantially less than the global mix (9 percent compared to 18 percent). The region is ecologically rich and varied, yet only has five WH sites under the relevant qualifying criterion of significant natural habitats and ecosystems, and these tend to be physically remote and cover large areas, requiring careful management. For example, millions of migratory birds pass through the region each year, and the Ramsar Convention on “wetlands of international importance especially as waterfowl habitat” is named after the MENA Iranian city on the Caspian Sea that in 1971 hosted the event.Footnote 28 The region now has dozens of the world’s 2,000 Ramsar sites, with the Banc d’Arguin WH site (Mauritania) an important stopover on the East Atlantic Flyway migration route.
Over the years the Middle East has involved UNESCO in much political controversy and conflict that has altered its membership and affected its WH sites, particularly related to the geopolitics of oil and the contested status of Israel/Palestine. For example, two years after the first WHC was held in Paris, the United States of America, in 1974, suspended its payments in protest at UNESCO’s opposition to the state of Israel and recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The USA left entirely in 1983, rejoined to win international support when it was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, only to leave again in 2017, partly over Israel but also because the Trump administration refused to pay its contributions. (In 2023 the Biden administration committed to rejoining.Footnote 29) The UK followed the USA by leaving in 1983 but rejoined in 1997 after a change of government. Israel, which had been an early and active UNESCO member and had multiple WH sites, left in 2017, reluctantly following the USA.Footnote 30 The Oslo Accords gave Palestine UN observer status in 2011, making it eligible for WH sites (it now has three inscribed). The Old Jerusalem WH site, disputed between Israel and Jordan, is still not assigned to any state, with its permanent status remaining unresolved in international law.Footnote 31
Regional instability has been damaging to MENA’s WH sites, many of which the WHC lists as endangered.Footnote 32 The destruction of sites and assets important for cultural identity can be an explicit goal of modern asymmetrical warfare. One example is the occupation by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) of the Palmyra WH site (Syria), which resulted in the destruction of many of its structures and the public execution of its antiquities director in a symbolic rejection of non-Islamic cultural values.Footnote 33
A less extreme WH dispute, between Bahrain and Qatar over some islands in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, was adjudicated in the International Court of Justice in 2001,Footnote 34 which granted some to Bahrain and others to Qatar. Qatar had built a fort at Zubarah in 1939 to defend against Bahrain and contentiously in 2013 secured it as its first inscribed WH site, described as the best-preserved example of an eighteenth/nineteenth-century trading and pearl town in the Gulf region.Footnote 35 This did not prevent Bahrain’s head of state, during the diplomatic crisis of 2017–2021 between Qatar and its neighbors, publicly condemning what he called the Qataris’ illegal aggression against Zubarah some eighty years before.
The impact of these conflicts is such that the region now has many WH sites listed as endangered by the WHC, increasing from eight in 2010 to twenty-two in 2021 (although three were reinstated over the same period). All of Syria’s WH properties have been added since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2013.Footnote 36 The WHC defines danger broadly, including accelerated deterioration, impacts of development projects upon water levels, changes in land use or ownership, abandonment and armed conflict, serious natural calamities (such as fires, earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, floods, and tsunamis), and vulnerability to looting and other predations.Footnote 37
Oman has the unenviable distinction of having the first and only site in the MENA region to be removed entirely from the WH inscribed list. Only two other WH sites, both in Europe and in the cultural category, have been delisted by the WHC because it found new development projects compromised OUV: the Elbe Valley in Germany and Liverpool in the UK.Footnote 38 Oman’s natural WH site, the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary, covered nearly three million hectares of Oman’s desert and had been inscribed in 1994 as a natural WH site to preserve the rare oryx, extinct in the wild since 1972, but with a free-ranging herd reintroduced in 1982. The reintroduction failed, and WH status was revoked partly because of predation of the wildlife, but primarily because the government opened most of the site to oil prospecting; the Arabian oryx population on the site had fallen from 450 in 1996 to sixty-five in 2007, when it was delisted. The future of the endangered oryx was, however, helped when Saudi Arabia got WH status in 2022 for “Uruq Bani Ma’arid,” one of the planet’s most spectacular desert landscapes in the so-called empty quarter.Footnote 39 This new listing supported the reintroduction of the oryx and partly compensated for the situation in Oman.
The MENA region’s Gulf states, rich in fossil fuels and among the wealthiest in the world, have recently emerged rather belatedly as champions of environment, heritage, and biodiversity. Since 2006 Oman has obtained six WH listings (but losing one as discussed earlier), Bahrain three, the United Arab Emirates one (Abu Dhabi’s Al Ain Oasis),Footnote 40 and Qatar one (Zubarah).Footnote 41 Saudi Arabia got its first WH listings in 2008 for three sites and went on to add five more between 2014 and 2023. The latest additions (2023) to the WH list include eight in the MENA region, going some way to creating a more balanced and representative global distribution.
The WHC maintains a list of “tentative” WH sites that are not yet inscribed but which SPs consider suitable, after due consultation and participation with stakeholders. Such is the enthusiasm by SPs for proposing WH sites that there are currently more on the tentative list than have already been inscribed: Iran, for example, has sixty-one on its tentative list, over twice as many as its twenty-seven inscribed sites. Tentative nominations are required to precede by at least one year before formal submission, and SPs are expected to review and resubmit their tentative listings at least every ten years. Since most of the tentative sites listed globally are over ten years old (some dating from the 1990s), many more decades will be needed for them to upgrade or convert to inscribed status. With funding constraints, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and WHC concerns about poor management arrangements on inscribed sites, SPs might do better to improve their existing WH site management before seeking to add more. Table 14.2 shows existing inscribed MENA WH sites in the natural and mixed category.
Table 14.2 Natural/mixed WH sites in the MENA region
| Country (year inscribed) | Site | Brief description |
|---|---|---|
| Egypt (2005) | Wadi Al-Hitan | Western Desert fossil remains of the emergence of the whale as an ocean-going mammal |
| Iran (2006) | Lut Desert, or Dasht-e-Lut | Arid subtropical area, spectacular sand ridges from wind erosion, stony deserts and dune fields |
| Iran (2019) | Hyrcanian Forest | Deciduous broad-leaved forests some 850 km along the Caspian Sea coast |
| Iraq (2016) Mixed | Ahwar Refuge of Biodiversity and Landscape of Mesopotamian Cities | One of world’s largest inland delta systems, in a hot and arid environment, with remains of Sumerian cities |
| Jordan (2005) Mixed | Wadi Rum | Inhabited by many human cultures since prehistoric times |
| Jordan (2007) | Dana Biosphere Reserve | Four biogeographical zones with great biodiversity, endangered species, and rock formations |
| Mauritania (1989) | Banc d’Arguin | Nesting and migratory birds, sand dunes, shallow coastal waters |
| Saudi Arabia (2022) | ‘Uruq Bani Mu’arid | “Empty Quarter” diverse fauna and flora in extreme desert |
| Tunisia (1980) | Ichkuel | Biodiversity with many endemic species |
| Yemen (1980) | Socotra Archipelago | Unique biodiversity, endemic species |
14.4 Legal, Regulatory, and Policy Issues on WH and Biodiversity in the MENA Region
Article 29 of the 1972 convention requires SPs to submit periodic reports on the state of conservation of their sites, and the WHC’s Arab states region (comprising most of MENA) was reviewed after its third cycle of periodic reporting (2018–2021) at the 44th WHC session held in Fuzhou (China) in 2021. This was a substantial document providing valuable evidence on current issues in the region, and this section examines them in descending order from international to national and local levels of law and governance.Footnote 43 WHC decisions may not have the force of international law, but SPs as signatories have undertaken to uphold the convention, which gives the WHC significant powers and sanctions through its procedures of WH inscription and its tentative and endangered lists. The third-cycle action plan framework for the region identified three strategic objectives going forward: a more representative and balanced WH list; better protection, conservation, and management of WH, particularly for endangered sites; and better integration of sustainable development policies in WH management.
14.4.1 WH Processes for Inscription, Tentative Lists, and Endangered Sites
SPs propose sites as WH sites to the WHC, which announces each year new sites for inscription. The numbers of new sites peaked at sixty-one in the millennium year of 2000 but have since fallen to an annual average of about twenty-two. The WHC’s control over inscription gives it considerable power over sites coming forward, and the associated procedures can be lengthy and costly, but that has not discouraged SPs from seeking more WH listings. The third-cycle review for the region found that its SPs saw the highest benefits of WH status as strengthened protection and conservation, better conservation practices, enhanced honor and prestige, and increased tourism and site presentation, while they attached less importance to associated economic and social development.
The WHC aspires to a balanced, representative, and credible list, with in theory no limits on the number of WH sites and no quotas for SPs to reach. The costs of the listing process can put poorer and smaller countries at a disadvantage, making obtaining and sustaining funding an important issue. The primary criterion for inscription is OUV, with additional criteria of authenticity (the ability of a property to convey its significance over time) and integrity (sustaining that significance over time).Footnote 44 The MENA region added eight new sites in 2023, a significant increase that reflected in particular a greater interest from the oil-rich Gulf states.
The extreme inequalities between and within MENA states may impede future WH sites from coming forward. WHC expectations for WH sites have grown over the years, as governed by its Operational Guidelines.Footnote 45 When first issued in 1977 they comprised thirty-one paragraphs but had expanded dramatically to 290 by 2021, imposing additional commitments and responsibilities, alongside associated guidance on such matters as tourism and visitor management. WHC requirements can delay inscription, as the example of Oman’s Aflaj cultural WH site shows.Footnote 46 It took two years from the initial report in 2007 before inscription in 2009, because the WHC required new laws to protect the property, a management plan with community involvement, local management systems, and the formation of an interdisciplinary management committee. Eventually the Oman government was able to satisfy the WHC requirements for sustainable management, supporting the physical restoration of the Aflaj and associated structures.Footnote 47
The SPs in the region prepare “tentative lists” of sites that may convert into listing applications, which the WHC publicizes through its website. Tentative lists can generate dialogue and cooperation, among SPs and various communities and stakeholders, but the third-cycle report found in the region poor engagement with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), local industries, local authorities, and landowners. It identified a need to better consider WH requirements and criteria, to address the issues of sites being impacted by conflict or losing potential OUV, and to integrate a sustainable development perspective. SPs are also expected to compile heritage inventories/registers which can be used to identify suitable sites for the tentative list, and to broaden stakeholder involvement in heritage. With funding constraints and other adverse factors, some SPs should improve existing site management before seeking to add more. Cultural and natural heritage are now expected to be a strategic element in national sustainable development policies and strategies in areas such as involving indigenous peoples and local communities, and ensuring growth, employment, and investment in tourism.
The WHC has identified some fourteen negative factors that can affect the OUV of WH properties and holds the ultimate sanction of removing a site from the list after a period on the WHC public endangered list, a requirement of Article 11(4) of the convention.Footnote 48 Among the dangers affecting the region are conflict, influx of refugees, serious decline in populations of valuable species, development pressures and mining activities, impact of dam projects upon water tables and supply, increasing salinity, decline of migrating bird populations, illegal grazing, and poaching. Endangered status for a WH site is perceived nationally not only as a dishonor but also damaging for tourism revenues. In 2023, of fifty-six entries on the global endangered list, the MENA region had over a third (twenty-one), a significant proportion mostly reflecting the impact of conflicts such as the Syrian civil war.Footnote 49
The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda gives high importance to protecting biological and cultural diversity and ecosystems, and biodiversity protection involves multiple international conventions as well as WH. Protected wetlands, for instance, overlap wholly or partially with over 150 Ramsar sites globally, and marine and coastal ecosystems in WH sites cover over 2 million km2, with a crucial role in climate regulation, for instance storing 15 percent of the world’s blue carbon assets in seagrasses and tidal marshes.Footnote 50
14.4.2 National Legislation, Policy, and Funding
Each SP is responsible for protecting and managing its WH sites through national legislation such as heritage monument protection and nature conservation. The adequacy of such legal protections depends upon the resources and capacity of SPs and their particular legal histories and traditions. In the MENA region these vary widely, which is a consequence of successive legal systems over centuries, including Roman and Byzantine rule under the Justinian legal code, Islamic and Ottoman law, and more recently colonial interventions by European powers (particularly Britain and France but also Spain, Italy, and Portugal).Footnote 51 National legal systems are further complicated by the survival of subnational legal traditions within different communities – ethnic, tribal, and religious.Footnote 52 WH statutory protection relies upon SP capacity and political will to undertake law reforms where needed.
The WHC third-cycle review of the region noted various new heritage laws or amendments to existing but found several SPs with only partially adequate legal protection for natural heritage in particular. SPs identified deficiencies in legal frameworks to include a need for updated definitions of terms and concepts, the role and capacity of the judiciary, impacts of conflict and security matters, decentralization, and coordination among stakeholders. All of the natural WH properties in the region were recommended for better and more stable funding. The third-cycle review also identified that effective cooperation between different levels of government was sometimes lacking for identifying, protecting, and presenting WH. Reforms to land laws, for example, can have a significant impact upon WH sites and are currently being promoted for the region by the World Bank, UN Habitat’s Global Land Tools Network, and other international agencies. Under this initiative two Arab Land Conferences were held in Abu Dhabi in 2018 and Egypt in 2021, with hundreds of registrations and much exchange of valuable knowledge, and a World Bank research study on “land matters” was published in 2023, which encouraged more regional cooperation and improved land governance.Footnote 53
14.4.3 Local Management
Local management systems are the front line for protecting and conserving WH sites and need resources and capacity building. Management failings may be affected, not only by political disruptions and conflicts but also by inadequate resources and staffing. One of the requirements of listing, sometimes lacking in the region, is defining WH site boundaries and often also a geographical buffer zone around the property, especially where the site has sensitive ecosystems needing careful management. The planning and management of land use should protect and police the site against unwanted interventions from developers and incoming populations, who are often refugees displaced by environmental and other factors. When the UK’s port city of Liverpool was delisted in 2021, at the same WHC session when the third-cycle review was presented, the WHC judged that local planning decisions to allow development for a football stadium and a mixed-use development had caused “serious deterioration and irreversible loss” to its OUV.Footnote 54 A key local management issue is how to manage tourism, especially increased tourist visitor numbers: In MENA annually hundreds of thousands visit the main sites, although falling to only hundreds in those less visited. Tourist overload can damage a site’s OUV and the biodiversity that is supposed to be protected. Sites nominated for inscription may not satisfy tests of their OUV, and there has been some criticism about whether WH status is worth the trouble.Footnote 55
The third-cycle report review recommended making capacity development a priority for the region. For more than half of the region’s WH properties, available human resources only partially met the management needs, while funding for projects usually came from external funds and most SPs lacked a national capacity-building strategy for WH site staff. Unsurprisingly the conflict-affected countries were most likely to suffer from inadequate budgets for both cultural and natural heritage conservation.
One ground for optimism is the increased availability of geospatial technologies and better connectivity with academic networks. For example, stakeholders are applying geospatial technology for WH management, generating 3D “digital twins” (as was done for Palmyra’s monuments destroyed by ISIS), LIDAR surveys of WH sites, and mapping to prepare against future threats, both natural and man-made. With the apparently insatiable demand for WH tourism, so-called digital nomads using new technologies are becoming a new kind of tourist with less direct impact upon the biodiversity that needs protection because they may not visit in person.Footnote 56
14.4.4 Education, Participation, and Public Awareness
While not governed under legislation, the third-cycle regional review found that participation of local communities was often poor and needed mechanisms to promote the effective participation of different stakeholders. A more decentralized state could allow local people and social capital to contribute more. The review also found that education, information, and awareness-raising was better among researchers, the tourism industry, national/international tourists, and NGOs than among local authorities, communities, and landowners. Youth, children, women, and indigenous peoples showed less awareness and understanding of the topic, and heritage could have a stronger function in the life of communities through the use of WH resources to use heritage and biodiversity to improve local economic and living conditions. Local authorities at the subnational level are the most directly involved agencies but the local agents responsible for cultural heritage may themselves have limited understanding of basic principles or knowledge of the relevant history, creating a need for specialist training. SDG 4 (education) includes Target 4.7 to link education to other SDGs and promote sustainable development within a lifelong learning framework.Footnote 57
14.4.5 Intangible Cultural Heritage and Climate Change Issues
The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Property added a new dimension to WH,Footnote 58 recognizing that cultural activities are vehicles of identity, values, and meaning, and the third-cycle report identified WH properties in the region with associated inscribed intangible practices/traditions. Changes in traditional ways of life and knowledge systems are having a negative impact on WH properties, for example the erosion of ancestral fishing methods by unsustainable fishing techniques and the abandonment of traditions and long-established skills, changing traditional uses of building materials.
Climate action is increasingly seen as requiring not only new knowledge but also the rediscovery and revival of old ones, which have been neglected in the fast-moving “modernization” that is now seen as contributing to global warming and climate change. One intangible cultural heritage listing with relevance for WH properties in the MENA region was made in 2020 for Japan: “Traditional skills, techniques and knowledge for the conservation and transmission of wooden architecture.”Footnote 59 The MENA region has long experience designing for a hot and dry climate, but much of that traditional knowledge has been neglected or forgotten and often relegated to an academic subdiscipline of “vernacular architecture.”Footnote 60 Those concerned with sustainable architecture are now seeking ways to learn from old building methods and alternative building materials. UNESCO’s World Heritage Earthen Architecture Programme (2007–2017) has boosted interest in both traditional and new forms of it and identified 150 WH properties built with this ancient technology.Footnote 61
Among the ancient MENA traditions for adapting buildings to extreme climate conditions are the so-called wind catchers (in Iran known as bâdgir): tall, chimney-like structures that capture cool prevailing winds and redirect them downwards into buildings.Footnote 62 In 2017 the WHC inscribed as a WH site the Iranian city of Yazd, nicknamed the “City of windcatchers,” and also the country’s windmills (or Asbads). Another MENA tradition relevant to climate change is the qanat (known across the region under different names). Thousands of kilometers of such systems exist to move water underground from an aquifer or well at higher attitudes to supply settlements and irrigation without the need for pumping and losing little to evaporation.Footnote 63 The WH sites of Oman’s system (known as aflaj) and the “garden city” of Al Ain (Abu Dhabi) were inscribed in 2006 and 2011, respectively.Footnote 64 A revival of such systems through community engagement can be promoted through WH and intangible cultural heritage, although much needs to be done.
14.5 Conclusions and Recommendations
From the preceding sections some concluding recommendations can be offered on biodiversity and WH in the MENA region. The WHC’s third-cycle action plan framework for the region in 2021 identified three strategic objectives: a representative and balanced WH list; better protection, conservation, and management of WH, particularly for endangered sites; and better integration of sustainable development policies in WH management.
To discuss these in turn, after fifty years of WH listing since the originating convention in 1972, the emphasis upon cultural rather than natural categories has shifted toward issues of sustainability and biodiversity, especially since the international CBD. Aiming toward a more representative and balanced WH list, new WH inscriptions in the MENA region between 2010 and 2018 have included several of biodiversity significance: the Sanganeb Marine National Park and Dungonab Bay/Mukkawar Island Marine National Park (Sudan, natural, 2016); the Ahwar of southern Iraq (refuge of biodiversity and the relict landscape of Mesopotamian cities, mixed, 2016); the Al-Ahsa Oasis (Saudi Arabia, cultural, 2018); and most recently ‘Uruq Bani Mu’arid (Saudi Arabia, natural, 2023).Footnote 65
The action plan’s second strategic objective – better protection, conservation, and management of WH – has many challenges, especially maintaining the OUV of WH sites. The third-cycle report found that this was often compromised by challenges of climate change, extreme weather events, and conflict. Heavy rains and flooding have an impact on earthen structures, with ensuing growth of vegetation on external facades causing cracks and fissures. Other threats include falling water tables, overfishing reducing marine life, land conversion by growing human populations, overgrazing, wild plant collection, and commercial hunting. Boundary delineation of some WH properties and their buffer zones has been found inadequate to maintain their OUV.
The third-cycle report also found that visitor management and tourism strategies sometimes did not effectively maintain the OUV, with insufficient cooperation between the tourism industry and WH site management. Capacity building is needed in sustainable tourism for WH sites. improving the management of biodiversity and better public awareness. All these actions depend upon more resources and sometimes better legislation and policing. Better public awareness of heritage and biodiversity issues requires formal and informal education and the participation of hitherto overlooked or excluded groups such as local indigenous and nomadic communities. Teaching and training materials for integrating living heritage into nonformal education can bring it closer to local communities, with WH still often little known by local communities, landowners, and young and indigenous peoples.
The third and last strategic objective of the third-cycle WHC action plan for the region is better integration of sustainable development policies in WH management. The UN Sustainable Development Agenda includes many SDGs relevant to biodiversity – 11, 13, 14, and 15, and also 17 (“Partnerships for the Goals”). There are many different kinds of partnerships that can help biodiversity protection of world heritage. Multidisciplinary research is breaking down the traditional paradigms of academic and professional knowledge, and the contribution of local indigenous or traditional knowledge, especially for natural heritage, biodiversity, and climate action, is now becoming better recognized. Wider participation and inclusive partnerships are bringing together researchers, politicians, professionals, local communities, and educators to develop new approaches to sustainable development. Technological advances in academic publishing are creating a wider reach for open-access online research, and improved communication technology offers many opportunities for the generation, management, and transfer of knowledge. The 2020s are identified as the “decade of action” for the Sustainable Development Agenda, and WH and biodiversity are important vehicles for that action.
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