There are many threats to cultural heritage sites today, but chief among these are:

Development Pressures
A driving force of loss in many developing economies is rapid economic transformation. Here, the appeal of modernization often wins out over that of cultural heritage preservation, and even national level heritage protection does not guarantee that a major cultural asset will survive. The long-term global benefits of cultural heritage are often discounted against opportunities for short-term domestic economic development. Instead of funding site conservation, ancient cities and buildings are torn down to make way for modern infrastructure and archaeological sites are neglected or surrounded by poorly planned commercial development.

Unsustainable Tourism
Tourism is the primary source of foreign exchange for 83% of developing countries, but the rapid growth of international travel over the past ten years has placed unsustainable pressures on fragile cultural heritage sites and often on surrounding areas and communities as well. The official UNESCO World Heritage seal can mean that millions of visitors will appear within a few years, trampling these precious sites, with few capable conservation leaders or agencies equipped to protect them from damage or eventual destruction.

Insufficient Management
Inscribed UNESCO World Heritage sites are required to have a management plan, but many plans exist on paper only and numerous non-UNESCO inscribed cultural sites in the developing countries have no management plan at all. But poor management can also include unscientific restoration: Here there may be a plan and available funds, but the restoration is not conceived, supervised, or implemented by skilled professionals, and the actual result is the loss of some or all of the cultural integrity that defined the site’s original character and value.

Looting
Looting is an age-old threat and continues to be a problem in the 21st century in all countries, but it is often exacerbated in developing nations by an enforcement vacuum resulting from war and conflict or when law enforcement is still weak or non-existent. Economic desperation, a common side effect of sanctions and war, can also lead to widespread looting as people seek any means to support their families.

War & Conflict
War and conflict often wreak havoc on cultural heritage. Iconoclasm, or “image breaking,” is particularly devastating because it involves the deliberate destruction of another culture’s images, icons or monuments to demoralize that cultural group and establish political or religious superiority over it.

Natural Disasters
Earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters impact many UNESCO World Heritage sites every year, but without prevention funding and expertise, few sites in the developing world can be prepared to withstand the damage inflicted. Preparation requires planning and mitigation to reduce the exposure to risk of cultural heritage sites. Sites worldwide remain vulnerable to damage or destruction from natural hazards, yet, with expertise and funding, appropriate strategies can be built into management plans to address these threats.

Underlying Causes of Damage and Loss

While identifying the threats to our global heritage is relatively easy, countering them effectively requires understanding their root causes. Typically the underlying issues are not discrete, but interactive, making it necessary to consider them both individually and collectively.

Lack of appreciation for the severity and scale of the problem
Underlying the processes of damage to and destruction of cultural heritage sites in developing countries is a general failure - at the international, national, and local levels - to grasp the severity and scale of the problem. The international media, for example, will cover individual acts of damage or destruction, but there is little reporting on the overall scale and severity of the problem. At the national level, too, there is often insufficient understanding of the threats to or value of a country’s unique cultural treasures, while at the local level conservation objectives can be undermined if these are perceived to hinder meeting the basic needs of the local communities and their inhabitants are not offered a stake in the sites’ long-term preservation and the revenue they can generate.

Lack of national funding and international support
In the poorest countries and regions almost no funding goes to preserve some of the world’s most important and unique archaeological sites and historic towns and cities. Committed international support for emergency and on-going conservation in the developing countries is miniscule compared to the problem.

Lack of skilled experts
A shortage of trained people is an especially urgent problem in developing countries. In most, especially the poorest ones, there are few skilled professionals - archeologists, conservation experts, material specialists, structural engineers and historic architects - to participate in conservation activities. Thus the future looks bleak for cultural heritage conservation in the developing countries, most of which do not have sufficient expertise and funding to ensure that their heritage sites are conserved to international standards (source: World Heritage: Challenges for the Millennium. Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2007).

Lack of effective monitoring and enforcement
Lack of monitoring and enforcement is a problem at every level. At the international level monitoring the status and trends of cultural heritage site management has proved challenging as guidelines do not currently exist. A complicating factor is that, for governments with limited financial resources, monitoring and enforcement are often unaffordable or unjustifiable in the face of more urgent national needs. Finally, at the local level, neighboring communities are seldom given a stake in a heritage site’s successful preservation or the proceeds that can derive from good management with the result that law enforcement has to regularly counter their illegal activities rather than create benefit from their positive involvement.