World Heritage

The objective of the Our Common Dignity initiative has been to contribute towards building awareness of rights issues in World Heritage and heritage management, to promote ‘good practice’ approaches to rights and their enabling conditions, and to develop and recommend relevant tools and guidelines in World Heritage, from tentative list nomination through to management.

Natural World Heritage sites are internationally recognised as having the highest global nature conservation priority. As of November 2017, there are 241 natural and mixed (both cultural and natural) World Heritage sites, representing about 0.1% of the total number of protected areas globally, but yet with a total coverage of 294 million hectares, accounting for 8% of the combined surface of terrestrial and 6% of marine protected areas.

Protecting natural areas and ecosystems is not anti-development. This report shows that by conserving large areas of habitat, natural World Heritage sites also increase resilience to natural and weather-related disasters, support livelihoods for communities, and provide communities with vital protection against the impacts of climate change.

This document presents the key results of the Our Common Dignity initiative on rights and World Heritage undertaken by the Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Convention (ICCROM, ICOMOS and IUCN) under the coordination of ICOMOS Norway between 2011 and 2016. The report describes and discusses work carried out by the Advisory Bodies during this period, and should not be seen as their final words nor their entire institutional opinion on this topic.