After the Australian government expressed concerns that
including the country’s World Heritage sites in a recent United Nations report
about the negative impact of climate change could damage tourism, the
Australian sites were removed from the report.
Foremost among those sites is the Great Barrier Reef, whose
coral has already been severely damaged.
But a lead author of the report said last week that the
expunging did not change the fact that Australia’s World Heritage sites and the
thriving tourism economy they sustain are at dire risk due to global warming.
“I was disappointed that we had to omit information on the
Australian sites — the Great Barrier Reef, Tasmanian wilderness and Kakadu
National Park,” said Adam Markham, deputy director of climate and energy at the
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and a lead author of the report. “It now
appears this was due to pressure on [the United Nations Education, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (Unesco) by the Australian government.”
The report, titled “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing
Climate,” was released on May 26 by Unesco in collaboration with the United
Nations Environment Program and the UCS. It examined how climate change poses
one of the most significant threats to World Heritage sites.
It lists 31 World Heritage sites in 29 countries that the
authors deemed vulnerable to rising temperatures, melting glaciers, rising sea
levels and intensifying weather events, such as more severe droughts and
wildfires. Some of the case studies include Venice, Stonehenge, the Galapagos
Islands and Cartagena, Colombia.
“Climate change could eventually even cause some World
Heritage sites to lose their status,” Markham said in a news release about the
report.
That, apparently, was among the reasons the Australian
government was concerned about the report. Australia’s Department of the
Environment said in a statement that the report might create confusion about
the status of World Heritage sites and that negative commentary about World
Heritage sites could affect tourism. In an email exchange with Travel Weekly
last week, a Tourism Australia spokesman declined to comment on the decision to
remove mention of the country’s sites from the report.
Nevertheless, the UCS took matters into its own hands. It
published the portion that had been deleted from the report, its most updated
case study on the Great Barrier Reef, on its website, ucsusa.org.
In that report, the UCS acknowledged how important an
economic driver the Great Barrier Reef is, stating that it contributed $5.2
billion to the Australian economy in 2012 and supported 64,000 jobs, about 90%
of the total economic activity in the region, with visitors spending nearly 43
million nights in the region in 2012.
According to the UCS, the largest threat to the Great
Barrier Reef today, including to its ecosystems, biodiversity and tourism
economy, is climate change, specifically warming sea temperatures, accelerating
rates of sea level rise, changing weather patterns and ocean acidification. Due
to numerous negative environmental factors, the status of the Great Barrier
Reef was determined as being “poor and deteriorating” by the UCS, which
estimated that half of the reef’s coral cover has been lost in the past 30
years.
“UCS believes conversations about the mounting threats to
the Great Barrier Reef and other World Heritage sites need to happen and should
be done publicly, which is why we published an updated version of the case
study on the Great Barrier Reef that was removed from the report on our
website,” Markham wrote.
As for the overall World Heritage climate change report, the
goal was to provide a basis for action as a follow-up to the December adoption
of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and to the 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development, adopted by the United Nations in October.
The report also provides recommendations on how to proceed
in order to mitigate the threats that climate change poses to World Heritage
sites, ranging from additional and more thorough analysis of the threats
themselves and specific causation to adding more natural environments and
wilderness sites to the World Heritage list so that those areas can receive
attention and protection as well.
“The report as published,” Markham said, “includes a very
broad and representative selection of World Heritage sites, and its message
remains clear: Climate change is fast becoming one of the most significant
risks for World Heritage sites across the globe. It’s safe to say that the
sites profiled in the report are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of those
that are vulnerable to climate impacts.”