Progress toward the sustainable development of world cultural heritage sites facing land-cover changes

Progress toward the sustainable development of world cultural heritage sites facing land-cover changes

Guo, Huadong (International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals; International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage under the Auspices of UNESCO)
Chen, Fulong (International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals; Chinese Academy of Sciences; International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage under the Auspices of UNESCO)
Tang, Yunwei (International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals; Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Ding, Yanbin (Hengyang Normal University)
Chen, Min (Nanjing Normal University)
Zhou, Wei (International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals; Chinese Academy of Sciences; International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage under the Auspices of UNESCO)
Zhu, Meng (International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals; Chinese Academy of Sciences; International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage under the Auspices of UNESCO)
Zheng, Wenwu (Hengyang Normal University)
Pereira Roders, A. (TU Delft Heritage & Architecture)

2023

The quantification of the extent and dynamics of land-use changes is a key metric employed to assess the progress toward several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that form part of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. In terms of anthropogenic factors threatening the conservation of heritage properties, such a metric aids in the assessment of achievements toward heritage sustainability solving the problem of insufficient data availability. Therefore, in this study, 589 cultural World Heritage List (WHL) properties from 115 countries were analyzed, encompassing globally distributed and statistically significant samples of “monuments and groups of buildings” (73.2%), “sites” (19.3%), and “cultural landscapes” (7.5%). Land-cover changes in the WHL properties between 2015 and 2020 were automatically extracted from big data collections of high-resolution satellite imagery accessed via Google Earth Engine using intelligent remote sensing classification. Sustainability indexes (SIs) were estimated for the protection zones of each property, and the results were employed, for the first time, to assess the progress of each country toward SDG Target 11.4. Despite the apparent advances in SIs (10.4%), most countries either exhibited steady (20.0%) or declining (69.6%) SIs due to limited cultural investigations and enhanced negative anthropogenic disturbances. This study confirms that land-cover changes are among serious threats for heritage conservation, with heritage in some countries wherein the need to address this threat is most crucial, and the proposed spatiotemporal monitoring approach is recommended.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:32b815c2-b775-41a7-9c2b-4afec67b3ab2

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xinn.2023.100496

Innovation, 4 (5)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 Huadong Guo, Fulong Chen, Yunwei Tang, Yanbin Ding, Min Chen, Wei Zhou, Meng Zhu, Wenwu Zheng, A. Pereira Roders, More Authors