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Seema Paul describes bids to conserve, and bring sustainable development to, natural World Heritage sites |
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If biodiversity is the measure of life on Earth, natural World Heritage sites provide perhaps the best places to take the pulse of the planet. For they are recognized to contain the most important habitats for biodiversity conservation in the world.
The sites are designated under the UNESCO World Heritage Convention as places of ‘outstanding universal value ... for whose protection it is the duty of the international community to cooperate’.Yet they face many of the same problems that are threatening biodiversity around the globe, including loss of habitat, invasive species, overexploitation and pollution. Their status has often not translated into national or international assistance for their conservation. Many suffer from a lack of resources, as does the United Nations, thus limiting the technical capacity to implement biodiversity initiatives. Human concerns The United Nations Foundation focuses its biodiversity work on these sites both to sustain some of the Earth’s most important biological jewels and to promote sustainable development. While working to conserve wonders of the natural world, it uses projects in these sites to promote replicable conservation approaches that respond to human concerns. In the process it hopes to build greater public urgency about the need to protect biodiversity, and to leverage increased funding for initiatives in the field. The UN Foundation was the first funder to focus on World Heritage Biodiversity sites, and has tripled the resources going to them through UNESCO alone. It has also catalysed tens of millions of dollars in parallel funds from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and is also working with UNEP, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and many others. Partnerships established by the UN Foundation with the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Conservation International will allow the World Heritage Centre to tap into their existing networks, bringing it on-the-ground conservation capacity for the first time. Thus the UN Foundation is strengthening overall United Nations capacity for conservation through public-private partnerships. The sites and national parks that have already received assistance range from Argentina to China, from a subterranean river in the Philippines to the Himalayas, from Komodo Islands in Indonesia (home to the famous ‘dragons’) to Uganda’s Impenetrable Forest.
Tourism and conservation UNEP, the World Heritage Centre, the RARE Centre for Tropical Conservation and AVEDA, the environmentally conscious cosmetics company, are collaborating on a four-year, $2.5 million UN Foundation project to link sustainable tourism and biodiversity conservation in six World Heritage sites. And FAO is developing community-based forest enterprises to promote sustainable natural resource management at two more. Other success stories are reported elsewhere in these pages. The work to conserve five threatened World Heritage sites in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is particularly important as it could provide a model for conserving biodiversity in conflicts: the Biodiversity Support Programme’s prestigious publication, The Trampled Grass: Mitigating the Impacts of Armed Conflict on the Environment, has already described it as such. The Society for Conservation Biology gave its 2002 Distinguished Achievement award to the Charles Darwin Foundation for, among other things, its UN Foundation-supported work on invasive species in the Galapagos, and the beekeepers project at Mt Kenya has won many awards including a first prize in the Poverty Challenge Expo in 2000 and 2001.
If projects like these can be increasingly replicated, the pulse of the planet will beat a little more steadily
Seema Paul is Senior Program Officer for Biodiversity at the United Nations Foundation. PHOTOGRAPH: Hoang Them/UNEP/Topham |
Issue on Biological Diversity, 2000
Issue on Culture, Values and the Environment, 1996
AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment:
Biodiversity
Ecosystems
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