• Unesco meeting in South Korea to decide new listings, heritage-in-danger• Biblical sites in occupied West Bank, Lebanese castles, South Sudan’s savannahs and grasslands are among fast-tracked nominations• Russia’s Lake Baikal under scrutiny over mounting ecological damage
PARIS: The United Nations looks set to list a biblical site, Lebanese castles, an antelope migration path and the world’s deepest lake as world treasures under threat, including from war or climate change.
The 196 member states of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) are to cast votes from Friday next week on new additions to its World Heritage and World Heritage in Danger lists when they meet in Busan, South Korea.
“We may not have the means to deploy peacekeepers … but we can send a message to the entire world,” the director of Unesco’s World Heritage Centre, Lazare Eloundou Assomo, told AFP.
“These sites are important, and everything must be done to prevent their destruction.” “Safeguarding heritage allows communities that have been traumatised, victims of conflicts, to begin to come back and rebuild,” he added.
