A new report by the United Nations has found that climate change is becoming one of the biggest threats to UNESCO world heritage sites, including the coastal town of Lunenburg, N.S.
Lunenburg and 30 other sites around the world are all vulnerable to drought, wildfires and rising sea levels, which could deliver a major blow to the tourism industries and the economies of the countries where the sites are located, the study said.
Established in 1753, Lunenburg is widely considered the best example of a British colonial settlement in North America.
The town is one of the top destinations for the 1.8 million tourists that visit Nova Scotia each year, but rising sea levels in the Atlantic threaten to permanently inundate coastal land in the province.
Other at-risk sites include Stonehenge, the Statue of Liberty, Angkor and perhaps most vulnerable, Venice.
“All of the 31 sites we looked at have some impacts of climate change already, but you’d have to say that Venice in Italy is one of the most at risk sites,” Adam Markham, the lead author of the study, told CTV News Channel. “Even though they’re developing flood gates that area costing them more than $6 million to keep out storm surges, they still will be vulnerable to rising waters in the Venetian Lagoon.”
Markham said that the kind of threat depends mainly on where the world heritage site is located.
“Some of the hotter stops are experiencing wildfires,” he said. “Australia has been experiencing terrible wildfires in recent years, as has the western United States … That threatens places like Yellowstone (National Park).”
In drier countries, long-term droughts are the biggest threat to world heritage sites such as the Islamic structures in the Saharan region of Africa, Markham added.
The UN report made several recommendations for protecting these sites against the threats posed by climate change, starting with more research on the issue.
“We need to know a lot more about which of the sites are the ones that are most vulnerable,” Markham said. “There are more than a thousand world heritage sites and for most of them, we don’t know very much about how at risk they are.
“The first thing we need to do is find out which are the most vulnerable and then make sure that we direct resources for preparedness and resilience to those sites.”
Markham countries such as Canada the U.S. already spend millions each year preserving and researching the threats to their heritage sites. But resources to do so are often lacking in developing countries, leading to inadequate information on how to best preserve the sites.
