2024 Volume 27 Issue 2 Pages 111-117
The year 2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of UNESCO’s World Heritage (WH) program, with 1,157 cultural and natural sites listed based on 10 criteria. The list has earned global conservation kudos, but unfortunately the WH sites’ effectiveness in endorsing heritage has resulted in increased visitor numbers, placing more pressure on already environmentally fragile sites. Enhanced monitoring is fundamental to tackling such threats, so IUCN launched its WH Outlook in 2014, featuring a triennial inventory of all natural WH sites. This paper focuses on the Asia region, unpacking the monitoring indicators used to assess the effectiveness of natural WHS management at those natural WH sites in 2014 and during two subsequent updates in 2017 and 2020. The results add site-specific context by looking at green-flagged examples from Japan, including Shiretoko, Ogasawara and Amami, along with the red-listed Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra in Indonesia. The results in this paper also suggest that the third monitoring outlook saw improvement in some sites compared to the 2014 and 2017 outlooks, which suggests that the reports could serve as a benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of the management of each respective natural site. There is still room for improving the current IUCN Outlook protocol, such as providing much more comprehensive reports on each site, that could point the way from red-listing to green. The findings of this paper may provide insights for future IUCN Outlooks, specifically towards fulfilling area-based targets in the Global Biodiversity Framework adopted during the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD-COP15) in 2022.
