By Peter Hughes

UNESCO World Heritage is the most famous brand in conservation. Inclusion on the World Heritage List is supposed to be a talisman protecting the most precious places on the planet. For travellers, it's taken as a hallmark, distinguishing the best the world has to offer, man-made or natural, up there with the Taj Mahal, the centre of Florence and the Grand Canyon National Park.

At least that's the perception. But, now In its 37th year, this international order of excellence is looking severely tarnished. World Heritage is no longer the flag waved to warn that our treasures are threatened but a self-serving decoy to delude us into believing the very opposite.

What is its point? The World Heritage List now looks like little more than another grandiose collection of Wonders of the World, of Things to See Before the Icecaps Melt. Its greatest value is as a tool for advertising tourist attractions. Otherwise, it has all the dubious credibility of an organic label slapped on a muddy carrot.

To understand the philosophy of World Heritage, you need to go back to its utopian origins and the adoption, in 1972, of the World Heritage Convention. This is an international treaty that, in effect, says there are places on the planet so transcendently important that mankind as a whole should be responsible for looking after them, and not just the countries in which they happen to be.

What gave the convention a final romantic shove into being was the success of the campaign, mounted in 1959, to save the ancient Egyptian temples in the kingdom of Nubia Abu Simbel among them. At the instigation of UNESCO, 50 countries between them rescued more than a score of monuments from the rising waters of the Nile before the High Dam was built at Aswan.

It was in this spirit of international solidarity, and the imperative to defend places of "outstanding universal value" from increasing threats of destruction, that led to the creation of the World Heritage Fund. The idea was to alert the world to the menaces to its inheritance and mobilise public opinion to the conservation cause. But it doesn't take much to turn ideals into deals.

There have been successes. The restorations of Angkor and Dubrovnik, the prevention of a highway near the Pyramids and of an aluminium plant on the doorstep of Delphi are just four of many. But the task is immense and grows more daunting by the year. Currently there are 878 places on the list, distributed among 145 countries. More sites are added every summer—27 in 2008. And to administer this programme, U ESCO gives the World Heritage Fund around $4 million a year. There are other funds at its disposal, but most of them are committed to specific areas of spending.

World Heritage is pitifully under-resourced. The World Monuments Fund (WMF), a New York-based non-governmental organisation founded in 1965, disburses around $13 million a year to protect endangered cultural sites. It contributed more than $10 million to the restoration of a single 18th-century church in London-St George's, Bloomsbury, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The Global Heritage Fund, another NGO, with headquarters in California, has revenue of around $5 million a year, but was only founded in 2002 and is working on just ten sites, all in the developing world. UNESCO has admitted that its list has traditionally been weighted in favour of Europe, Christianity and "elitist" architecture, as opposed to vernacular.

Unlike independent NGOs, World Heritage doesn't pick the candidates for consideration for its list. They are submitted by the 185 countries signed up to the convention. Here lies its weakness. World Heritage is a paradigm of the United Nations itself, the ultimate committee, permanently up to its axles in procedure. This, you will recall, was the organisation that managed to vacillate even when faced with the moral absolute of getting relief to the 2008 cyclone victims in Burma. Thus do the values of World Heritage rest in the solipsistic mitts of countries that see it as a means to their own ends, never mind any highflown notion of international solidarity.

Final selection, after a rigorous technical assessment, is down to the 21 members of the World Heritage Committee. For a site then to make it onto the list is a beguiling prospect. The value of having a respected agency of the UN bestowing its imprimatur on your chosen attractions, ostensibly for free, is incalculable. Tourist offices must think they have struck the marketing mother lode. It is not, however, necessarily an incentive for nominating the most vulnerable sites. There must be a temptation to recommend places that need promoting as much as protecting.

Chauvinism comes into it too. World Heritage celebrates man's achievements and nature's riches, so countries compete keenly to have their own treasures recognised. Each, however small, feels entitled to at least one site on the list. As a leading figure in international conservation, who asked not to be named, told me: "This has led in recent years to a politicisation of the process and horse-trading that reaches absurd levels; also to the listing of sites that in 1972 would never have been envisaged as being universally significant." Another informant asked, "Why on earth did an ironworks in Germany go on the list?" A source within the World Heritage Centre's headquarters in Paris confessed, "The fact that the process is flawed is quite obvious. It's as flawed as our international politics. The list does what member states want it to do, not what T MDRB N thinks."

Politicisation cuts two ways. The United States, the principal architect of the World Heritage Fund and the first to ratify the convention, has recently shunned the organisation. For whatever reason—possibly a general disenchantment with the UN—it has not had a site listed since l995. Now opinion has shifted and there are 14 US contenders for future consideration. In publicising their change of heart, the Americans assured sceptics that sovereignty is not an issue. World Heritage has no legal power over the owners of listed sites, nor does the UN have any authority to manage them. Which then raises the question: what influence does UNESCO have, once a site is listed? A spokesman for World Heritage explained that by ratifying the convention, a country promises to preserve its heritage as a principle and implicitly undertakes to look after any site it submits for listing. "It has to say in some detail how it is going to manage that property," he said. Listed sites are checked every six years. If there are problems, it is up to the states concerned to follow UNESCO's advice to resolve them.

That's the theory, but according to two sources active in the conservation field, the reality is different. Both work alongside UNESCO on different projects and did not want to be identified. One told me, "In many cases tbere is poor management of listed sites. In poor countries there is even a lack of awareness among local managers as to what WH listing means. And governments don't seem to appreciate that listing carries with it responsibilities, not only kudos."

The other was more pointed: "On the poor side of the planet, hundreds of WH sites have little or no budget, no management plan, no map, no legal protection, no technical training, and these are some of the most important sites." Asked for examples, he reeled off a roll call of countries, rather than specific locations, Algeria, Honduras, Turkmenistan and Mozambique among them.

It's not only in the third world that problems arise. UNESCO's ultimate sanction is to remove any wayward sites from its list, something it has done only once. The Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman was delisted in 2007 when the government reduced the size of the reserve by 90 percent in order to explore for oil. (Alas, poor oryx.) But before pulling the expulsion trigger, UNESCO can draw attention to sites that are especially threatened by placing them on its World Heritage In Danger list.

For some, it amounts to probation. There are 30 places presently on the danger list. Many, like sites in Afghanistan, Congo and Jerusalem, come as no surprise. But among them is Dresden, one of Germany's showpieces, which could be delisted next year if a new bridge is built across the Elbe. The Galapagos Islands, the first place to be given World Heritage status, are also considered to be particularly at risk. Ironically, the threat there comes indirectly from tourism, which many see as an inevitable by-product of World Heritage listing.

UNESCO's is not the only danger list. Every two years the World Monuments Fund publishes its list of the world's 100 most-endangered sites. The latest came out in 2008. It's instructive to compare the two. Only three places appear on both. One comprises the Buddhist remains of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, where two monumental statues from the sixth century were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. This site on the Silk Road dating from the first to 13th centuries has been abandoned and looted, but now Japan is paying for its salvage. The other two places on both UNESCO and WMF danger lists are the cultural-heritage sites of Iraq (UNESCO concentrates on the ancient cities of Ashur and Samarra while WMF frets about the country as a whole), and the great Indian Ocean ports at Kilwa in Tanzania through which so much trade passed from the 13th to 16th centuries and which are deteriorating badly.

Yet 18 sites on the main World Heritage List—or key buildings within them—not thought to be in peril by UNESCO, appear among the WMF's most endangered (see next story). The remaining 79 WMF sites are not registered with World Heritage at all, presumably because their countries don't think their status warrants it. What makes the comparison more sobering is that on WMF's long list, from which the 100 are picked, the number of sites under threat runs to more than 400.

The World Heritage spokesman said they made no claims to exclusivity. "UNESCO is not telling countries they should only preserve sites on the list. It's supposed to encourage an international momentum for heritage preservation. It never pretends to be the only body in charge of that," he said. The trouble is, that's not the way the public sees it. Most people think the World Heritage List is definitive and that its sites are all fuIfy funded and scrupulously managed. Many, even some of the most high-profile, are not. UNESCO itself is unhappy with the way the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu are being run. Others worry about the pressure of tourist development at Angkor.

But perhaps the greatest failure is the way in which the original ethos of World Heritage has been perverted. Rather than alerting us to the danger to our precious places, it now makes us complacent; rather than drawing attention to the fragility of our heritage, it is being worn as a badge to market it. God is in His heaven, heritage is on the list and all's well with the world. It isn't.

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