Saving Our Vanishing Heritage -

 

 

Saving Our Vanishing Heritage

An International Initiative to Identify and Counteract Threats to Cultural Heritage Sites in the Developing World

Global Heritage Fund launched its Saving Our Vanishing Heritage (Vanishing) initiative in 2010 to increase and expand global awareness of the loss of cultural heritage sites in developing countries over the past decade. In addition to raising and broadening public awareness, program objectives include identifying innovative solutions to reverse negative trends in cultural heritage conservation outcomes, building private-public partnerships and increasing overall funding for heritage conservation targeting developing countries.

The foundation of the initiative is a global study titled Saving Our Vanishing Heritage which now has an editorial committee that comprises 25 international experts from a range of institutions including UCL, MIT, Stanford and the World Bank. With their input, Vanishing will present a general consensus on the state of cultural heritage conservation, causes of its loss and proposed solutions to mitigate the loss.

The record of human civilization - our global heritage - is vanishing before our eyes. Global Heritage Fund is driving the development of a new study – Saving Our Vanishing Heritage: Destruction and Loss in the 21st Century – to reveal that archaeological and heritage sites worldwide - primarily in developing regions - have suffered an unprecedented rate of damage and loss in this past decade. 

New solutions and proven models need to be shared. Heritage destruction in the developing world needs to be brought to the forefront of global discourse with the global community, national governments, philanthropists, foundations and corporations to achieve breakthroughs for heritage conservation in the poorest countries.

The world faces unprecedented environmental and social challenges. Devastating poverty confronts the human population as it swells beyond 6.6 billion and the gap between rich and poor widens. Simultaneously, mega-city development and mass tourism threaten to destroy many of our most important world heritage sites.

These challenges call for innovation and new funding on an unprecedented scale, and Global Heritage Fund is playing a major leadership role in saving our vanishing heritage.

The record of human civilization - our global heritage - is vanishing, and we hardly realize it. If this trend continues, though, the world will soon have lost many of the remaining foundations of humankind’s history. The losses in the past decade include ancient monuments, buildings, archeological sites, and even entire historic cities and townscapes, all of which have survived for hundreds or even thousands of years. The damage to cultural sites appears widespread and accelerating and represents a permanent loss to the planet, akin to endangered species loss. Awareness of the crisis, however, both internationally and locally, remains low.

This report, Saving Our Vanishing Heritage: Challenges to and Solutions for Preserving Endangered Cultural Heritage Sites in the Developing World, has compiled published reports on over 1,000 major archaeological and heritage sites in over 120 developing countries.  Sites covered in the study include UNESCO Inscribed and Tentative List Word Heritage sites, as well as nationally recognized heritage sites in developing countries. GHF reviewed public records, international press reports and other verifiable accounts of destruction, including gut-wrenching photos and vivid video of the desperate state of endangered sites around the world. GHF’s resulting report brings together - for the first time - this once fragmentary anecdotal evidence into a unified picture documenting the perilous state of our global heritage in the world’s developing countries.