World Heritage Sites in Danger

World Heritage Sites in Danger



   
April 2007 -   The Great Barrier Reef, 
Kilimanjaro National Park, and The Tower of London are among 
the UNESCO World Heritage sites that will be threatened by 
climate change in this century, according to a publication by 
the UN agency released today. 
The report, "Case Studies on Climate Change and World 
Heritage" is intended to raise awareness and mobilize support 
for preservation of the 830 natural and cultural sites 
inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. 
The UNESCO report follows the second of three global 
assessments by the UN's Intergovermental Panel on Climate 
Change, IPCC, released on Friday. 
A herd of elephants in Kenya's Amboeseli National Park with 
Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro behind them. The mountain's famed 
ice fields are melting. 
The latest assessment projects that human-caused global 
warming will produce droughts and floods across the world, 
that glaciers and ice sheets would melt, resulting in floods 
and rising sea levels as well as extreme weather events over 
the next century. 
Today's publication of the UNESCO report follows a 2005 
decision by the World Heritage Committee to start studying the 
impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. 
In March 2006, 50 experts on the subject met at UNESCO and in 
July 2006 they presented the World Heritage Committee with 
predictions, suggestions for management of climate change 
impacts, and a strategy to assist the 183 countries that are 
Parties to the World Heritage Convention. 
"The international community now widely agrees that climate 
change will constitute one of the major challenges of the 21st 
century," says the Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro 
Matsuura, in his Foreword to the publication. 
Matsuura calls for "an integrated approach to issues of 
environmental preservation and sustainable development." 
Divided into five chapters, the UNESCO report deals with the 
impact of global warming on glaciers, marine biodiversity, 
terrestrial biodiversity, archaeological sites, and historic 
cities and settlements. Lead author is Augustin Colette, 
climate change consultant to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Glaciers 
The melting of glaciers around the world is affecting the 
appearance of sites inscribed for their outstanding beauty and 
destroying the habitat of rare wildlife species such as the 
snow leopard and the red panda in Nepal's Sagarmatha National 
Park. 
The park is an exceptional Himalayan high altitude landscape 
dominated by Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain. 
The Pattar glacier in Nepal's Sagarmatha National Park 
It is now feared that the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly 
retreating because of climate change. Since the mid-1970s, the 
average air temperature rose by 1°C in the Himalayan region, 
almost twice as fast as the global average warming of 0.6 °C 
reported by the IPCC, this trend being most pronounced at high 
altitude sites. 
Almost 67 percent of the glaciers in the Himalayan and 
Tienvironment newshan mountain ranges have retreated in the past decade – 
by as much as 30 meters per year for the Gangotri glacier. 
Rapid melting of glaciers is already increasing the magnitude 
and frequency of catastrophic floods downstream. The continued 
melting will eventually affect the availability of life-giving 
water for drinking, food production, and ecosystem 
maintenance. 
Changes in the atmospheric temperature and in the rate of 
rainfall will affect the equilibrium between the amount of 
precipitation stored in winter and the melt during summer. 
The melting season of snow coincides with the rainy season in 
the Himalayas. Consequently, any intenvironment newsification of rainfall 
is likely to contribute to the rapid disappearance of snow and 
ice. 
These changes could have disastrous effects on human lives 
with flooding resulting from glacial lake outbursts 
threatening human settlements. The establishment of monitoring 
and early warning systems and the artificial draining of 
glacial lakes are recommended to help avoid disasters. 
The global average temperature increase projected by the end 
of the century ranges from 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C. The UNESCO 
report states that a 4 degree C increase of atmospheric 
temperature would eliminate nearly all glaciers on Earth. 
Marine Biodiversity 
The report examines the effects of climate change on the 
marine World Heritage sites. Seventy percent of the world's 
deep sea corals, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of fish 
species, are expected to be affected by changing conditions 
related to rising temperatures and increased ocean 
acidification by the year 2100. 
Australia's Great Barrier Reef, listed as a World Heritage 
Site in 1981, is expected to be subjected to increasingly 
frequent bleaching events, cases in which corals turn white 
and may die due to rising sea temperatures. 
A glimpse of Australia's Great Barrier Reef 
The largest coral reef ecosystem in the world, 2,100 km in 
length, the Great Barrier Reef Lagoon contains 2,900 
individual reefs with 400 species of corals, 1,500 species of 
fish and several thousand species of molluscs. It is the 
habitat of species such as the dugong and the green and 
loggerhead turtles, which are threatened with extinction. 
According to model projections, warming in the Great Barrier 
Reef Region would be in the range of 2 to 5 degrees C by 2100. 
The most likely outlook is that mass bleaching events, leading 
to widespread death of corals, will become more frequent on 
the Australian coast in the coming decades. 
IUCN-World Conservation Union estimates that 20 percent of the 
world's coral reefs have already been wrecked. A further 50 
percent are facing immediate or long term danger of collapse, 
the IUCN said today at the opening of the IUCN Marine 
Protected Area Summit in Washington, DC. 
"Governments and the conservation community need to step up 
marine protection if we are to support the global effort to 
tackle climate change," said IUCN Director General Julia 
Marton-Lefèvre. 
"As Friday's UN Climate Change Report stated, a sea 
temperature rise of 1-3 degrees C will be enough for a major 
decline in coral reefs, unless corals adapt to warmer waters. 
This acclimatization will only be possible if they are 
protected from other stresses such as pollution or 
overfishing," Marton-Lefèvre warned. 
Intact coral reefs and mangroves act as natural barriers 
against storms and floods. Healthy marine ecosystems 
world-wide will be more resilient to climate change impacts 
such as coral bleaching and mortality, displacement of key 
species and overall decline in ecosystem quality if coral 
reefs remain intact. 
Coral reefs provide livelihoods to 100 million people and 
provide the basis for industries such as tourism and fishing, 
worth an annual net benefit of US$30 billion. 
Terrestrial Biodiversity 
Biodiversity on land is also threatened by climate change, 
says the report, which features a detailed case study of the 
Heritage Site of Cape Floral Region Protected Areas, South 
Africa, where biodiversity is threatened by shrinking 
bioclimatic habitats - due to warming and changes in 
precipitation. 
The Cape Floral Region represents less than 0.5 percent of the 
area of Africa but it is home to nearly 20 percent of the 
continent's floral biodiversity. As such it is one of the 
richest areas for plants in the world. It displays the highest 
levels of endemism at 32 percent and it has been identified as 
one of the world's 18 biodiversity hot spots, and due to its 
unique floristic values it is recognized as one of the world's 
six floral kingdoms. 
Cape Floral biome at South Africa's Table Mountain, a UNESCO 
World Heritage Site in the Western Cape Province. 
According to the IUCN, experiments, observations and modeling 
show that climate change might be the most significant threat 
facing biodiversity in the Cape Floral Region over the next 50 
to 100 years. The most threatening aspects of climate change 
are shrinking of optimal bioclimatic habitats with warming and 
potential drying; ecosystem changes in response to 
modification of environmental conditions; and increase of fire 
frequency. 
As a result of these physical changes, four out of five 
protected areas in South Africa are predicted to lose 10 
percent to 40 percent of their plant species by the year 2050. 
The first impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of the 
Cape Floral Region are already becoming apparent, UNESCO 
reports. 
Climate change will force some plant and animal species to 
migrate as they are unable to adapt to their changing 
environments, which poses a problem for the conservation of 
biodiversity hotspots listed as natural World Heritage sites. 
On the global scale, climate warming is expected to lead to 
changes in the distribution of species, including invasive 
pathogenvironment news and parasites and on the timing of biological 
events, such as flowering, and the relationships between 
predator and prey, parasite and host, plant and pollinator. 
The report recommends several measures to deal with this 
problem such as the creation of protected areas. Another 
strategy is relocation of particularly endangered species 
either toward safer habitats in the wild, or by storing 
genetic resources in gene or seed banks, or in protected 
ex-situ conservatories. 
Archaeological Sites 
Climate change is also expected to damage archaeological World 
Heritage sites, according to the report which examines 
prospects for Chan Chan Archaeological Zone, Peru, alongside 
other World Heritage properties in Canada and the Russian 
Federation. 
Changes in precipitation and drought cycles, in humidity, 
water-table levels and environment newsuing soil chemistry will, 
inevitably, impact the conservation of archaeological remains.
 Likewise, temperature rises, especially the melting of 
permafrost in the Arctic region and rising sea levels are also 
expected to take their toll on this heritage. 
The report analyses how rainfall and flooding related to the 
El Niño pattern of warming in the eastern tropical Pacific is 
undermining the fragile earthen fabric of Chan Chan, the 
largest pre-Hispanic city in South America. The remains of the 
capital of the ancient Chimu Kingdom, it is one of the most 
important early earthen architecture cities in the Americas. 
"Of special concern for archaeological evidence, compared to 
any other type of properties, is the fact that climate change 
may jeopardize the conservation of precious evidences whose 
existence is even not known today," says the UNESCO report. 
Monolithic lanzon of Chavin 
The site of Chavín is the most significant and representative 
site of the Formative period, 1500 to 300 BC, in the Peruvian 
Central Andes. Its stone-faced platform mounds, terraces, and 
sunken plazas of this former place of worship are 
characterized by a series of subsurface galleries. It was 
inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1985, as an 
exceptional testimony of a civilization which has ceased to 
exist. 
Chavín lies at the confluence of the Mosna and Wacheqsa rivers 
in the province of Huari, in a high valley on the eastern side 
of Peru's Cordillera Blanca. 
This site is located near the Natural World Heritage site of 
Huascarán National Park. As elsewhere in the world, glaciers 
are melting in this area, leading potentially to the formation 
of glacial lakes, and to glacial lake outburst floods. 
No matter whether the trend is toward an increased frequency 
of droughts or floods, the UNESCO report says, changes in 
water-table levels, in humidity cycles, in time of wetness, in 
groundwater, and in soil chemistry will impact on the 
conservation of archaeological remains. 
Historic Cities 
Rising sea levels and flooding due to climate change could 
have a devastating effect on both the buildings and social 
fabric of historic cities and settlements, according to the 
report. 
Climate change may lead to more frequent and intense flooding 
of the River Thames which flows through the City of London. 
The most significant flood threat to London arises from a 
combination of high tides and storm surges caused by low 
pressure systems travelling over the North Sea, and the 
funnelling of water from the southern North Sea into the 
Thames Estuary. 
The UNESCO report finds that by the 2050s, a 34 cm rise in sea 
level at Sheerness changes the one in 1,000 year flood level, 
to a one in 200 year flood event. By 2100, it is estimated 
that the Thames Barrier will need to be closed about 200 times 
per year to protect London from tidal flooding. 
The Tower of London is near enough to the Thames River to 
suffer flooding. 
Just one overtopping of the Thames Barrier will have an 
indirect cost blow to the British economy of £30 billion says 
the UNESCO report, which predicts that flooding will inundate 
at least the three World Heritage sites closest to the Thames 
- the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Tower of London 
and the Palace of Westminster. 
Rapid flowing waters will erode their walls, and post-flooding 
drying will favor the growth of damaging micro-organisms such 
as molds and fungi, the report warns. 
Founded in the fifth century and spread over 118 small 
islands, Venice is threatened by the sea level rise that is 
projected to result from climate change. "The whole city is an 
extraordinary architectural masterpiece in which even the 
smallest palaces contain works by some of the world's greatest 
painters such as Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and 
other artists," the UNESCO report says. 
The combination of local and global sea-level changes results 
in a net rising of the sea level in Venice. Out of the 10 
highest tides between 1902 and 2003, eight have occurred since 
1960. According to the moderate scenarios of climate change, 
the projected net altitude loss of Venice will reach 54 
centimeters by 2100. If nothing is done, Venice could be 
flooded daily. 
Prague in the Czech Republic is also threatened by flooding, 
but the ancient city of Timbuktu in Mali is in for a different 
kind of climate stress. The threats of sand encroachment and 
desertification are accompanied by extreme rain events. 
In the recent past, the mud mosques in Timbuktu suffered 
severe damage from the heavy rains of 1999, 2001 and 2003 that 
caused the collapse of traditional earthen buildings. 
Between 1901 and 1996, temperature increased by 1.4 degrees C 
in Timbuktu, and the impact of droughts is becoming 
significant. Projected changes show that in future the area 
will face a decrease in average rainfall, and an increase in 
atmospheric temperature, which will surely enhance desert 
encroachment and sandblown damage in Timbuktu. 
The UNESCO report, "Case Studies on Climate Change and World 
Heritage," is online at: 
http://whc.unesco.org/documents/publi_climatechange.pdf 

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