Impact Assessments for World Heritage

Impact Assessments for World Heritage

As the World Heritage Convention celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2022, over 1100 sites around the world are recognized as World Heritage - places that are so valuable to humanity that there conservation has been deemed our collective responsibility. Yet many of these exceptional places face increasing pressure from diverse types of development projects within and around the sites. Assessing the impacts of such projects – before deciding to proceed with their implementation – is essential to both prevent damage to World Heritage and identify sustainable options.

The Guidance and Toolkit for Impact Assessments in a World Heritage Context is the go-to reference that explains the process for achieving these goals. Offering practical tips and tools including checklists and a glossary, it provides a framework for conducting impact assessments for cultural and natural heritage sites.

Developed by UNESCO and the Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Committee, ICCROM, ICOMOS and IUCN, this manual fosters cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary collaboration to identify solutions for both protecting World Heritage sites and supporting good quality and appropriate development. States Parties to the World Heritage Convention, heritage managers, decision-makers, planners and developers are invited to use it to help realise our collective commitment to passing on our precious heritage to future generations.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This Guidance explains how impact assessments can be used to protect the Outstanding Universal Value of World Heritage properties in order to manage continuity and change by informing good decision-making in the context of UNESCO’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage – the ‘World Heritage Convention’ (UNESCO, 1972).
Chapter 2

Principles

This section discusses the principles that should underpin all impact assessments of proposed actions that could affect World Heritage properties and their Outstanding Universal Value.
Chapter 3

The World Heritage context for Impact Assessment

This section provides an overview of the World Heritage system: the World Heritage Convention; World Heritage properties and their values and attributes; World Heritage governance and management; and links to sustainable development.
Chapter 4

Impact Assessment for World Heritage

This section provides an overview of impact assessment and how it can be carried out for World Heritage properties. It addresses cases where an impact assessment is mandatory within a national or other framework and World Heritage considerations also need to be included.
Chapter 5

Assessing impacts on World Heritage as part of a wider environmental and social impact assessment

For many years, the World Heritage Committee has requested impact assessments to understand the consequences of proposed actions in or near World Heritage properties, and there is a great deal of professional expertise and guidance in this field. However, concerns have been raised about the rigour of these assessments on properties’ Outstanding Universal Value. A thorough understanding of OUV and other heritage/conservation values, and of the attributes that convey OUV, is crucial to conducting impact assessment for World Heritage.
This section explains how a wider impact assessment should address World Heritage in order to meet the requirements of the World Heritage Convention.
Chapter 6

Stand-alone assessment of impacts on Outstanding Universal Value

This section explains the process of carrying out a stand-alone impact assessment of a proposed action that may impact World Heritage. This stand-alone impact assessment on OUV and other heritage/ conservation values is referred to in this Guidance as a Heritage Impact Assessment. This may be appropriate where there is no existing impact assessment system or where the proposed action would not require impact assessment under existing legislation.
Chapter 7

Appendix: Tools

Tool 1 Values and attributes
Tool 2 Identifying potential impacts
Tool 3 Evaluating potential impacts