UNESCO alerts on the vulnerability of World Heritage which the UN institution is responsible.
by Rémi Barroux
The Timbuktu site, in Mali, listed as World Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization) since 1988, had seen its mausoleums destroyed by the jihadists , in July 2012. The city was then classified on the list of goods “in danger”. Today, it is no longer the jihadists who threaten the monuments of this ancient intellectual and spiritual capital, but climate change and the advance of the desert. Sandstorms, in particular, erude the ancestral sites built in the ground. Further south, in Ghana, it is the forts and castles of Volta and Accra, inscribed in 1979 on the list of heritage, which are jeopardized by the ocean which earns on average 2 meters per year on the coast.
In recent years, climate change has risen to the forefront, in front of geopolitical risks, threats to sites classified as UNESCO cultural and natural heritage, or 1,154 goods including nearly One in five is natural. “Protecting this heritage is also and above all, now, to face the consequences of climate change and the loss of biodiversity. It is the main threat that weighs and which is deployed today, that we see, That we measure in a tangible way, on World Heritage sites, “said UNESCO director general, Audrey Azoulay, at the conference held in Delphi, in Greece, November 17 and 18, in The occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 World Heritage Convention.
While negotiations trample at the World Climate Conference (COP27) of Charm El-Cheikh, the director called “for the responsibility of each of the States to develop solutions that meet the challenges”. In his entourage, it is specified that “the only effective measurement is the reduction of emissions of co 2 “. And Audrey Azoulay to recall figures that illustrate the extent of this planetary danger: 60 % of the threatened heritage forests, “half of the world heritage glaciers is likely to disappear by the end of the century and a third is already condemned” , “Almost all of the coastal sites of the Mediterranean would be threatened (…) by the end of the century by the rise of waters and erosion”, etc. /H2>
glaciers, forests, coral reefs, mangroves … In total, a third of the UNESCO sites would be in danger but, specifies an adviser from the Director General, “they are all potentially exposed to the demonstrations of this climate change”. The floods of the year 2022 in Pakistan, in addition to its dramatic human consequences – more than 1,100 dead and 33 million people affected – damaged two world heritage sites, the archaeological ruins of Mohenjo Daro and the “Historical Monuments in Makli, Thatta “.
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