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Ab o u t U s Ou r Ap p ro a ch GH F Pro j e cts Th e N e tw o rk N e w s & Eve n ts Su p p o rt GH F

Site suffering from neglect, Banteay Torp, Cambodia.

Principal Threats to Heritage

There are many threats to cultural heritage sites today, but chief
GHF Projects among these are:
Saving Our Vanishing Heritage
Development Pressures
A Global Crisis
A driving force of loss in many developing economies is rapid
Principal Threats to Heritage
economic transformation. Here, the appeal of modernization often
A Global Response
wins out over that of cultural heritage preservation, and even national
Tour Threatened Sites
level heritage protection does not guarantee that a major cultural
Preservation Fellow ship Program
asset will survive. The long-term global benefits of cultural heritage
are often discounted against opportunities for short-term domestic
economic development. Instead of funding site conservation, ancient
cities and buildings are torn down to make way for modern
infrastructure and archaeological sites are neglected or surrounded
by poorly planned commercial development.

Unsustainable Tourism
Tourism is the primary source of foreign exchange for 83% of
developing countries, but the rapid growth of international travel over
the past ten years has placed unsustainable pressures on fragile
cultural heritage sites and often on surrounding areas and
communities as well. The official UNESCO World Heritage seal can
mean that millions of visitors will appear within a few years, trampling
these precious sites, with few capable conservation leaders or
agencies equipped to protect them from damage or eventual
destruction.

Insufficient Management
Inscribed UNESCO World Heritage sites are required to have a
management plan, but many plans exist on paper only and numerous
non-UNESCO inscribed cultural sites in the developing countries
have no management plan at all. But poor management can also
include unscientific restoration: Here there may be a plan and
available funds, but the restoration is not conceived, supervised, or
implemented by skilled professionals, and the actual result is the
loss of some or all of the cultural integrity that defined the site’s
original character and value.

Looting
Looting is an age-old threat and continues to be a problem in the 21st
century in all countries, but it is often exacerbated in developing
nations by an enforcement vacuum resulting from war and conflict or
when law enforcement is still weak or non-existent. Economic
desperation, a common side effect of sanctions and war, can also
lead to widespread looting as people seek any means to support
their families.

War & Conflict

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War and conflict often wreak havoc on cultural heritage. Iconoclasm,
or “image breaking,” is particularly devastating because it involves the
deliberate destruction of another culture’s images, icons or
monuments to demoralize that cultural group and establish political
or religious superiority over it.

Natural Disasters
Earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters
impact many UNESCO World Heritage sites every year, but without
prevention funding and expertise, few sites in the developing world
can be prepared to withstand the damage inflicted. Preparation
requires planning and mitigation to reduce the exposure to risk of
cultural heritage sites. Sites worldwide remain vulnerable to damage
or destruction from natural hazards, yet, with expertise and funding,
appropriate strategies can be built into management plans to
address these threats.

Underlying Causes of Damage and Loss

While identifying the threats to our global heritage is relatively easy,
countering them effectively requires understanding their root causes.
Typically the underlying issues are not discrete, but interactive,
making it necessary to consider them both individually and
collectively.

Lack of appreciation for the severity and scale of the problem

Underlying the processes of damage to and destruction of cultural
heritage sites in developing countries is a general failure - at the
international, national, and local levels - to grasp the severity and
scale of the problem. The international media, for example, will cover
individual acts of damage or destruction, but there is little reporting on
the overall scale and severity of the problem. At the national level, too,
there is often insufficient understanding of the threats to or value of a
country’s unique cultural treasures, while at the local level
conservation objectives can be undermined if these are perceived to
hinder meeting the basic needs of the local communities and their
inhabitants are not offered a stake in the sites’ long-term preservation
and the revenue they can generate.

Lack of national funding and international support

In the poorest countries and regions almost no funding goes to
preserve some of the world’s most important and unique
archaeological sites and historic towns and cities. Committed
international support for emergency and on-going conservation in the
developing countries is miniscule compared to the problem.

Lack of skilled experts

A shortage of trained people is an especially urgent problem in
developing countries. In most, especially the poorest ones, there are
few skilled professionals - archeologists, conservation experts,
material specialists, structural engineers and historic architects - to
participate in conservation activities. Thus the future looks bleak for
cultural heritage conservation in the developing countries, most of
which do not have sufficient expertise and funding to ensure that their
heritage sites are conserved to international standards (source:
World Heritage: Challenges for the Millennium. Paris: UNESCO World
Heritage Centre, 2007).

Lack of effective monitoring and enforcement

Lack of monitoring and enforcement is a problem at every level. At the
international level monitoring the status and trends of cultural
heritage site management has proved challenging as guidelines do
not currently exist. A complicating factor is that, for governments with
limited financial resources, monitoring and enforcement are often
unaffordable or unjustifiable in the face of more urgent national
needs. Finally, at the local level, neighboring communities are
seldom given a stake in a heritage site’s successful preservation or
the proceeds that can derive from good management with the result
that law enforcement has to regularly counter their illegal activities
rather than create benefit from their positive involvement.

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