Islands as World Heritage Sites

No less than 95 out of 851 UNESCO World Heritage Sites are distinctively insular. This means their management plan and buffer zones:

• effectively cover an entire island or group of islands
• include complete islands whose features are crucial to the site's heritage value, or
• the site includes social or natural processes characteristic or symbolic of the whole island.

The sites can be grouped by island features:

• Atolls and reefs (Henderson Island, Belize Barrier Reef)
• Coastal island ecologies (Vietnam's Ha Long Bay, Panama's Coiba National Park)
• Colonial island settlements (Gambia's James Island, Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius)
• Island archaeology (Bahrain's Dilmun, Malta's Megalithic Temples)
• Ecosystems found only on one island (Madeira Laurisilva, Tasmanian Wilderness)
• Island lifestyles (Pico Island Vineyards in Portugal's Azores, Norway's Vega Archipelago)
• Monasteries, churches and shrines (Monastic Island of Reichenau in Lake Constance in Switzerland, Churches of Chiloé in Chile)
• Oceanic islands (Brazil's Atlantic Islands, New Zealand's Sub-Antarctic Islands)
• Prisons and fortresses (South Africa's Robben Island, Senegal's Gorée Island)
• Strategic island cities (Venice, Santo Domingo) and
• Volcanoes (Italy's Aeolian Islands, South Korea's Jeju Island).

Increasingly, the World Heritage Convention has been concerned with the imbalance between sites chosen for their cultural heritage and those chosen for their natural heritage criteria (with a small but growing number of 'mixed' sites and 'cultural landscapes'). Here, we find a marked contrast between the 756 'non-island' sites (including many on island states like Indonesia, Japan, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom where the sites do not have distinctive insular features) and the 95 island sites (see table below).

Two lessons can be drawn. First, the boundaries of islands help define their distinctive cultural and natural features. Second, the relative isolation of islands has been a powerful driver of social development and evolutionary change, helping keep the natural world as part of human culture too. Islanders could teach larger communities much about living in harmony with natural ecosystems.

Iain Orr and Graeme Robertson

Iain Orr
BioDiplomacy, 12 Otto Close, London SE26 4NA, UK
T +44 (0)20 86933584
biodiplomacy@yahoo.co.uk

Graeme Robertson
Global Islands Network
graeme@globalislands.net

See also

World Heritage Sites
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list

Island sites (a full list and analysis)
www.globalislands.net

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Copyright remains with the original authors but (unless stated otherwise) any article may be copied or quoted without restriction, provided both source (id21, insights) and authors are properly acknowledged and informed. Copyright © 2006 id21. All rights reserved.