Collaboration, Climate Challenges and K-Pop – the World Heritage Message from Busan

After ten non-stop days in Busan, Republic of Korea, the 48^th Session of the World Heritage Committee has closed. IUCN brought a strong delegation here, with Regional Director for Asia Dindo Campilan delivering our Opening Remarks, and supported by IUCN’s Key Messages for the event, as well as our extensive and detailed site-specific technical work.  Mr Campilan noted the important fact that all three chairs of the Rio Conventions COPs this year, Armenia, Mongolia and Türkiye are current members of the World Heritage Committee.  Here are my take-homes from this year’s deliberations.

K-Heritage – collaboration that rocks 

From the presence and messages of President of the Republic of Korea, H.E. Lee Jae-Myung and G-Dragon in the opening ceremony, and a K-Pop fuelled closing event, the distinctive and energetic contribution of Korean culture has been showcased here.  Alongside the stunning K-Heritage House exhibition held in parallel with “the COM”, we have found many connections to Korean partners.  These include the leading partnership for our work on World Heritage with the Korean Heritage Service (KHS), and we were happy to meet the Administrator of KHS to discuss future collaboration, including the exciting potential to launch a new IUCN-KHS initiative to support Key Geoheritage Areas, implementing IUCN Resolution 8.124, building on a major joint workshop on K-Geoheritage held in May 2026.  We also plan further work on the IUCN World Heritage Outlook.

A centrepiece was the agreement of the Busan Declaration, focusing on collaboration to support World Heritage.  With KHS, we plan to connect the work of our many partners and IUCN Members, including KHS, Korean National Parks Service, Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, and the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province. We are also partnering with two UNESCO Centres, the GCIDA focused on internationally designated areas, and WHIPIC focused on interpretation of heritage, and celebrated new MOUs with both organisations here too.  And we were happy to have the IUCN National Committee represented here, through its Secretary-General, so we can bring all our Korea members into this effort. 

New sites and old challenges

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has followed advice from IUCN, as the official advisor on nature, to inscribe seven new sites on the World Heritage list, expand one existing World Heritage site and approve the renomination and change in criteria of one other existing World Heritage site. 

Each of these nominations is a huge achievement, and a major commitment, and amongst the sites recognised was the first natural site we have ever evaluated under the Convention’s emergency procedure, the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape in South Sudan.  This huge and spectacular area, host to the world’s largest mammal migration faces critical threats, and was also listed as World Heritage in Danger, signalling the need for purposeful international support to deliver conservation outcomes.  A further highlight was the success of the host country’s own nomination, Getbol – Korean Tidal Flats Phase 2 – a 22% increase in protection of crucial wetland sites in the Yellow Sea, and the results of years of painstaking effort to secure conservation commitments.  We celebrate too the achievements of the sites listed in the USA, UAE, Denmark, Jordan, Greece and a renominated site in DRC.

Despite these inscriptions, natural and mixed World Heritage sites remain significantly underrepresented compared with cultural sites. We consider that addressing this imbalance requires practical and enhanced support to States Parties, including for the identification of potential sites as was done in a pilot stocktake for South-East Asia which identified more than 30 potential areas for World Heritage consideration. 

Beyond the nominations, the Committee approved our advice on conservation of existing World Heritage sites, with a variety of challenges and threats to be tackled.  The capacity of the World Heritage System to cope with the growing workload to support and monitor all the sites continues to stretch, beyond reasonable limits, and we need to look at new ways to ensure the financing and follow-up with the work that is needed. This includes finding new innovative ways to support the management of World Heritage sites, perhaps through a World Heritage bond as proposed in this blog co-written by Alfred DeGemmis, WCPA Thematic Vice Chair, World Heritage. 

A Roadmap for Indigenous Peoples Engagement

Amongst the most important decision taken by the Committee was the approval of a Roadmap for enhancing Indigenous Peoples’ Engagement in the World Heritage Convention.  Developed with the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on World Heritage (IIPFWH), and also with UNESCO, IUCN and our sister advisory bodies on culture, ICOMOS and ICCROM, it points to action on both the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ heritage values, and in strengthening their participation in the Convention.  This will enable a response to the actions needed to adapt the World Heritage Convention, including implementation of the requests made in the IUCN Global Indigenous Agenda agreed at the IUCN Congress in 2021. 

Key insights from side events at the World Heritage Committee

IUCN also supported several side events such as the World Heritage Site Manager’s Forum, co-organised by ICCROM and IUCN building on our continuous engagement with protected area managers as part of the World Heritage Leadership Programme. We also shared recently published resources to plan and improve management of World Heritage, key results of the IUCN World Heritage Outlook 4, examples of how Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA) can support World Heritage conservation, and the potential of the Preliminary Assessment Process. 

Other side events showcased how the World Heritage Convention can support national biodiversity objectives and how World Heritage can be better reflected in the Global Review of Collective Progress at CBD COP17. I was also pleased to be a panelist in the session Flying Beyond Borders, Conserving the Yellow Sea Tidal Flats through Transboundary Cooperation in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. The event resulted in the adoption of the “Busan Statement on Cooperation for the Coastal Wetlands of the Yellow Sea” which calls for transboundary cooperation between the two Koreas, China and international organizations to conduct joint scientific research, monitoring and data sharing for the effective management of World Heritage areas along the Yellow Sea. 

Climate change demands a new game

A final message is the increased prominence of climate as the central issue for the World Heritage Convention.  Dr. Sandeep Sengupta, IUCN Secretariat lead for climate joined us for the first time and has written an article here on how climate change is now emerging as a dominant and cross-cutting concern for the 196 States Parties that have ratified the World Heritage Convention. Although it was not on the formal agenda as such, in intervention after intervention, State Party representatives highlighted climate change prominently in the spectrum of pressures, threats and impacts that are affecting the World Heritage sites situated on their territories.  The Convention dates from a time when climate was not the pressing issue we see now, and IUCN is calling for fresh thinking on how it can adapt its working methods and approaches, with a new project across the IUCN Commissions working on new ideas.

With this I am signing off for another Committee, with thanks to the Republic of Korea, KHS and all our national partners. Next year we will be hosted by Türkiye in Istanbul, for 49COM, between 27 June and 7 July 2027, and will be working towards a strong offer for World Heritage at the IUCN World Protected and Conserved Areas Congress in Panama.  I close with deepest thanks to the brilliant and hard-working IUCN World Heritage team, and our big Union network, including all those expert volunteers who contribute their time via WCPA, SSC and other Commissions to ensure we can deliver the best and most constructive advice we can, in the name of IUCN. We only deliver here because of you. 

Thanks and goodbye from Busan. Stay tuned for updates on our IUCN World Heritage Linkedin Page.