SEOUL, July 22 (AJP) - UNESCO's World Heritage Committee adopted a new strategy on Tuesday to help small island nations protect cultural and natural heritage that climate change is steadily destroying, a group of countries that hold some of the planet's most distinctive sites but barely register on the World Heritage List, South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday.
The scale of the gap is stark. The 39 small island developing states that have joined the World Heritage Convention account for one fifth of its membership, yet together they hold just 37 of the 1,248 sites on the list, about three percent, according to UNESCO's World Heritage Centre. Three of them, Nauru, Niue and Timor-Leste, have no inscribed site and no candidate list at all.
Tuvalu shows what is at stake. The Pacific nation of nine coral atolls, where the highest point sits less than five meters above the waves, has watched the sea around it rise at twice the global average over the past 40 years. Half of its capital is projected to flood by 2050, and more than 5,000 residents, nearly half the population, have applied for a climate migration visa to Australia. Last year Tuvalu submitted its first-ever World Heritage bid, an unprecedented attempt to inscribe the cultural landscape of an entire nation, its meeting halls, taro pits and sacred sites, before the ocean claims them.
The World Heritage Strategy for Small Island Developing States (SIDS), adopted during the committee's 48th session in Busan, is meant to close that gap. It sets out an eight-year plan to strengthen the capacity of island governments to nominate, manage and defend their heritage.
The strategy answers a problem that has been raised for years. SIDS, a group of countries scattered across the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, were recognized by the United Nations as a distinct category of developing nations in 1992. They face the sharpest edge of climate change while running some of the world's smallest governments. Niue has a population of about 1,300. Tuvalu's entire land area is 26 square kilometers.
That smallness is why they have long been overlooked. Getting a site onto the World Heritage List requires years of technical work, nomination dossiers, comparative studies, management plans, that small island bureaucracies rarely have the staff or money to produce. International heritage funding and expertise have tended to flow toward larger developing countries with more sites, more institutions and more diplomatic weight, leaving island states at the back of the queue even as their heritage faces the most immediate threats.
To mark the strategy's launch, South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UNESCO World Heritage Centre held a joint side event at the BEXCO convention center in Busan on July 21, bringing together around 10 representatives of island states, including panelists from Mauritius, the Maldives, the Cook Islands and Cuba. Participants discussed climate resilience, governance, policy development and community participation, the pillars of the strategy's implementation, along with ways to strengthen partnerships over the eight-year rollout.
Lim Sang-woo, the ministry's Ambassador for Public Diplomacy, welcomed the adoption in his opening remarks. "SIDS possess outstanding cultural and natural heritage, yet they face numerous challenges, including climate change," Lim said. "I hope this event allows diverse views on protecting heritage in the SIDS region to be shared and lays the groundwork for practical cooperation."
The strategy's adoption came during the first World Heritage Committee session ever hosted by South Korea, which joined the convention in 1988. Around 3,000 delegates from 196 member states are gathered in Busan from July 19 to 29 to decide new inscriptions and conservation policy. On the session's opening day, the committee adopted the Busan Declaration, a separate consensus document calling for international collaboration to become a guiding principle of heritage protection as climate change, armed conflict and rapid development strain sites worldwide.
For Tuvalu, the timing is not academic. If current trends hold, projections show 95 percent of its land flooded by routine high tides by 2100.
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