Natural Heritage, and the World Heritage Convention

In one line

An international convention of 1972 that defines natural heritage, makes its protection the duty of the State on whose territory it stands, and makes its loss the concern of everybody else.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Article 2 treats as natural heritage the natural features consisting of physical and biological formations, the geological and physiographical formations and precisely delineated areas which constitute the habitat of threatened species of animals and plants, and the natural sites or precisely delineated natural areas, in each case of outstanding universal value; Article 4 provides that the duty of identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations belongs primarily to that State; and Article 6(1) provides that, while fully respecting sovereignty and without prejudice to property rights under national law, such heritage constitutes a world heritage for whose protection it is the duty of the international community as a whole to co-operate.

The two definitions

Article 1, cultural heritage, in three classes.

Monuments: architectural works, works of monumental sculpture and painting, elements or structures of an archaeological nature, inscriptions, cave dwellings and combinations of features, of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science.

Groups of buildings: groups of separate or connected buildings which, because of their architecture, their homogeneity or their place in the landscape, are of outstanding universal value from the same point of view.

Sites: works of man or the combined works of nature and man, and areas including archaeological sites, of outstanding universal value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view.

Article 2, natural heritage, in three classes.

Natural features consisting of physical and biological formations or groups of such formations, of outstanding universal value from the aesthetic or scientific point of view.

Geological and physiographical formations and precisely delineated areas which constitute the habitat of threatened species of animals and plants, of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation.

Natural sites or precisely delineated natural areas of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science, conservation or natural beauty.

Three things follow that an answer should say.

"Outstanding universal value" is the single test and it appears in every limb of both articles. It is not defined in the Convention; Article 11(5) leaves the Committee to define the criteria.

The categories overlap deliberately. A "site" under Article 1 is the combined work of nature and man, which is where a cultural landscape sits, and it is the answer to a question asking whether the Convention divides the natural from the cultural. It does not: it puts them in one instrument, and MU's papers, which always ask for both together, follow the Convention's own structure.