You're listening to a CNA podcast. Think of some of the world's greatest sites, the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House, Angkor Wat, or highly valued protected parts of our natural world. Yellowstone National Park, Ha Long Bay, the Okavango Delta. What do they have in common? Well, they're UNESCO heritage listed sites, and they're all desperately threatened by climate change. Today we look at the future of the most important places on our planet.
Hello and welcome to Climate Conversations. I'm Jack Go coming to you from Bangkok, Thailand, and from Singapore HQ Sle Ling Tan. How are you going? Hi,
Jack. I, how am I going? How am I doing? How am I going?
I'm doing well.
I'm well, thank you. I've been looking forward to this pod for a bit. I'm quite a history and architecture buff and the seven wonders of the world uh fueled a lot of my childhood imagination and sense of adventures. I'm sure it did yours as well.
Yeah, for sure. Nice. Have you ever played the game where you have to like remember what Are the seven wonders of the world, the new ones, we're talking or the new ones, all the old ones, and see how many you've been to. Well, it's what's kind of weird, of the new ones is there's actually 8 of them because they still count the pyramids. Because the pyramids still exist, they're classified as an ancient wonder of the world and also a kind of an honorary status. New wonder of the world.
So I haven't been to a lot of them, but you know, back in my day when I was a child, we didn't really differentiate between the ancient ones and the new ones. I remember, you know, with my brother, we would talk about the Great Wall, we would talk about Taj Mahal, the pyramids. I remember the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as well in the Colosseum that I've been to the Colosseum, not the not the gardens, but the Colosseum. I've been there. You're not that old.
Ah. So yeah, can you name the 7 old ones and the 7 new ones there? Uh,
the 7 new ones, yeah, because that is a bit of a game with some of my friends and fellow geography nuts we like to, you know, how many have you been to? So you've got the Great Wall, you've got the Colosseum, Machu Picchu, Petra in Jordan, Chichen Itza in Mexico. You've got Taj Mahal. And Christ the Redeemer. So I think I've been to 44 of
the. Well, that's not too bad. That's not too bad. Yeah.
The ancient ones, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes, Hanging Gardens, Pyramid
mausoleum of, I can't pronounce this. Yeah, that's a
mausoleum,
the mausoleum of Halicarnassus. There is, you mentioned the Colossus of Rhodes. There's another one. Zeus, the statue of Zeus, in what is now present day Turkey, I believe.
And is there library, the library?
No, you're thinking the Great Library of Alexandra, not on the seven wonders list, but there's one more in Celch. It's a ruin Temple of Diana, Temple of Artemis
Temple of Artemis or Dionysus.
No, Dys of wine. It's different. That's
the temple.
All right.
OK, we digress. But now it is actually time for the quiz. So we've already done multiple quizzes. Now, we're talking about UNESCO listed sites. They're often huge areas, they're often vast wildernesses, not just cultural sites. Of course, that can make it hard to protect them, which is something we'll be talking about today. But I want you to answer, which is the largest UNESCO listed site on the planet. I'm gonna give you four options. Is it the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, the Phoenix Islands
protected area of Kiribati? Is it the Kluwane, Wrangle, Saint Elias, Glacier Bay, Tatanini Alsek? Sorry for the pronunciation. That is in the US and Canada spans Alaska, Yukon, and the British Columbia series of national parks. Or is it the Algerian section of the Sahara Desert? The answer will be at the end.
OK, that is a bit difficult, but before we get into this, I do want to point out that not all the wonders of the world that we were discussing earlier are part of UNESCO World Heritage sites. There are overlaps. All the new ones, I believe, are World Heritage.
the other ones that don't exist anymore.
Yeah, yes, but they're not the same. They are also classified by different organizations.
It's hard to heritage lists something that is no longer standing. And that kind of brings us to our main story this week. As climate change intensifies, the places that humanity hold dear are under threat. A recent report by UNESCO and the World Resources Institute found that nearly 3/4 of all heritage listed sites around the world are highly exposed to water-related hazards. Think droughts, floods, and storms.
And in many places, these hazards are overlapping. It's threatening the future of our most magnificent landscapes, monuments that have stood the test of time, witness wars and triumphs, the collapse and rebirth of civilizations. This isn't the only report looking at the threats to World Heritage. Data and analytics company ClimateX last year ranked the top 50 sites most vulnerable to climate-related risks globally.
Number one is in our backyard, the cultural landscape of Bali in Indonesia, specifically the Subak system, which is those famous stepped irrigation system used in their paddy fields, which is threatened by surface flooding, extreme heat, and the risk of drought. Now all of these sites are special for a reason, and there are calls to do more to save them. Lee Ling is someone well versed in what the United Nations is up to. I'm sure you'll be able to give us a bit of a primer of what we're
actually talking about here, like, what is UNESCO? What does a heritage site actually mean? Oh,
we love good little primers on this pod. So basically, UNESCO is the UN Educational, scientific and cultural Organization. And what it does is it look at all those things that make up its mouth. Full of a name, but the gist is that it contributes to peace building, it promotes education and knowledge, it tries to level the playing field and fight poverty also fosters and organizes into cultural exchanges. Now the World Heritage listing is one of UNESCO's jobs and perhaps the most visible.
These are places of outstanding cultural or natural importance to humanity that still stand today. Now, a heritage site can be listed by UNESCO for cultural reasons, natural reasons or for just being an architectural or engineering marvel. It chronicles our natural history but also marks what we humanity can accomplish. So they can be romantic grand masterpieces like the Taj Mahal attribute by an emperor to his beloved wife or the Grand Canyon, known
for its natural beauty. I'm sure many of us have been there, seen it, I have breathtaking, but So well known for its geological history, these celebrate human ingenuity or land use, like, you know, the Philippine Cordilleras, the famous rice terraces there, or it could also be sites that contain important biodiversity or threatened species like the Galapagos Islands, home to species of plants and animals found
nowhere else on the earth. There are many criteria and lots of evaluations, but the designation brings countries benefits like tourism revenues, prestige. Access to funding and protection under international treaties and all in all there are nearly 1200 sites on the list. Italy has the most heritage sites followed by China, which of course is where the Great Wall is and that's
on the list as well. And you know, Jack, these World Heritage sites are under threat from natural and man-made events, things like conflict, over tourism, earthquakes, frequency of droughts and floods, and of course water is a major problem.
Yeah, you're right. So 73% of all heritage sites are facing a water-caused threat. That's what UNESCO is telling us. That has to be a serious concern, right? And 90% of those are cultural sites. So they're close to us, they're in cities, they're around human populations a lot of the time, and we value those places. We visit them. These lines from the report kind of struck me. These Sites stand as powerful reminders of humanity's enduring relationship with water.
While water is fundamental to their significance, it can also pose serious risks when its balance is disrupted, threatening the integrity of these irreplaceable places. So you have these extremes as well, either not enough water or too much water, and that's impacting these places.
Right. And the report mentions Many examples of those from Victoria Falls in Zambia, which is experiencing multi-year droughts to the Saga Martha National Park in Nepal, affected by this phenomenon called glacial lake outburst floods or gloss, which is linked to accelerating glacial retreat. Now Jack, I mean between the both of us, you're the authority here on gloss, right? You've done reporting. On gloves in Nepal and
you can call me
the glo guru. There you go. Take it away. Yeah,
I have. I have reported on glos. So I went to Aam Mustang in Nepal, looked at the glo issue there. So you have these abnormal annual melts due to global temperature rise, glaciers at high altitudes are feeding massive amounts of water into the surrounding lakes, because they're melting. And then you have the risk of these lakes collapsing, and that has communities throughout the region really on edge. It's really dangerous. And I visited villages that have been
hit by cloths in the past. There's no way of really knowing when a lake might burst. So you have similar things also playing out in Bhutan and in China and India and Pakistan. So just one of the impacts of global warming on potentially. Heritage sites and communities as well.
And the report also shows that Asia is central to this narrative, right? Water issues on this continent are significant and serious. Climate change being a factor, yes, but there are other human activity like urbanization, river regulation and upstream water withdrawal that are making things worse for these heritage and cultural sites and we could lose them.
We'll see them degraded in the years to come. They include Petra and Jordan, which we talked, we touched on earlier, the Angkor complex in Cambodia, Timbuktu in Mali, and the complex of Hui monuments in Vietnam.
Yeah, going back to the ClimateX report that I mentioned earlier, it's really clear to see the imprint of Asian heritage sites at high risk. So as well as the Bali landscape, rank. is #1, Indonesia has other listings, 2 in the top 50, like Komodo National Park, you have uh Vietnam's Ha Long Bay there as well. There are multiple sites in China, India,
South Korea, Japan, Pakistan. And to come up with these conclusions, Climate X modeled the future likelihood of 16 different climate hazards, including extreme heat, tropical cyclones, and flooding across 8. Different warming scenarios over a century. So it's probably not that surprising either that their findings do concur with the type of risks that UNESCO itself recognizes.
And for those of you who listen to us regularly, you know, we try to wrap up these types of chats by looking at some of the solutions that are on the table or being put in place and what we try to. We argue about the
solutions you bring some of your gloom to the discussion. Yeah,
OK, what can actually be done about this though and slow the decay because it's expensive to protect or restore antiquities and vast landscapes can't recover overnight, right? And it's not like the extreme events are going to stop. They're only going to get worse. So what UNESCO does is it provides emergency support. To states and countries to help in areas like rapid response and technical support, keeping in mind the need for
long term resilience and disaster risk reduction. So adaptation is a key thing that they look at, they look at innovative ways to manage water at sites, early warning systems, better ways to manage water resource, and of course also trying to promote traditional. Knowledge, local stewardship and even looking back in time at ancient solutions to solve some of these problems of today. Yeah,
a whole raft of potential solutions. And yeah, this idea of old knowledge, I think is really interesting, complimenting that with modern technology. And I saw this when I did a story about the climate impacts on ancient sites in Egypt. A couple of years ago. So when they were built, millennia ago, these structures were meant to last forever, for eternity. But amid this human-induced climate change crisis, even the the
strongest foundations may not survive. Crazy to think that they've stood for thousands of years and within decades, we are doing a pretty good job of dismantling them. But they are using new technologies over there, things like remote sensing. They use advanced mapping, visualization, so I think that's really interesting. It's something that probably we need to pay more attention to, but of course these technologies aren't going to help everywhere.
You're gonna have to find the right solution for the right type of sites, and when so many of them. 73% are threatened. It's going to take a big effort, I think.
And it's interesting too that so many of these sites kind of define who we are today as part of modern civilization and yet they are looking way back into the past and well into the future. For the solutions. I thought that was quite fascinating
work and hopefully I mean hopefully something works.
Anyway, we should also say that right now the 47th session of the World Heritage Committee is meeting at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Climate change, of course, is a central topic and we'll see if anything comes out of those discussions.
OK, back to the quiz then. I've been doing lots of talking. I don't know if you've had much time to think. This one's tough. Yeah, repeating it for you, which is the largest UNESCO heritage site by size on the planet? Amazon rainforest in Brazil, the Phoenix Islands protected area in Kiribati, a bunch of national parks that I'm not gonna say again. Basically glacial national parks spanning a big section of the US and Canada or the Sahara Desert, specifically in Algeria.
OK, this is this is me. OK. OK. Amazon rainforest, I know that. Part of it is designated as UNESCO heritage site, not the whole thing
dodged that I've,
I know what you're doing. I, you know, the fact is you have 3, you have two very vague ones one OK one and one that's so detailed. Yeah, that this so anyway, Phoenix Islands protected area and Kiribas, maybe. The queen wrangle Saint Elias Liia Bay touch touch Tasini Essek
wow, you've messed that.
That borders the US and Canada. So that's pretty, that's pretty massive. And then you Sahara desert, Algeria. What is that Jack, you're just throwing in. The Algeria part of a desert that comprises nearly a dozen countries. So I'm guessing that one is a herring is a red herring. Yeah. So you know, I'm going to go with the Kiribas one Phoenix Islands protected area because that's quite a vast area. of islands and oceans, right?
You're correct. It is. It is the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. It's a, it's just over 400,000 square kilometers. So it's larger than California, it's larger than Japan. It's about 560 times the size of Singapore. Massive expanse of ocean. Wow. But it's quite controversial right now. In late 2021, Kiribati modified the fishing rules of this marine area and it replaced what was a no-take policy with a plan that allows commercial fishing. When I went to Kiribati,
it was a big topic. You have a lot of Chinese vessels starting to fish throughout. This marine protected area. Now, it hasn't been delisted, but there is pressure on Kiribati right now to work with UNESCO to ensure that that doesn't happen. It could become the next step, I think, would be it listed, being listed as a heritage site at risk, I believe. So if we come and do this exact quiz in like
5 years, maybe the answer would be something different. OK, well, I think the national parks were the largest just Including land from what I remember. And yes, the Sahara Desert is not a UNESCO heritage site and only small sections of the Amazon are. So you nailed that.
Woohoo.
OK. OK, that's all for this week. We'll be back here next Thursday again. Thanks for listening.
Come back soon. Bye for now. Fee Ling Tan, signing
out. I'm Jack Ford, thanks to the team that produced this episode, Sai Yayin, Tiffany Ung, Janai Jahari, and Hei Ning.