Australian humid tropical forests have been recognised as globally significant natural landscapes through world heritage listing since 1988. Aboriginal people have occupied these forests and shaped the biodiversity for at least 8000 years. The Wet Tropics Regional Agreement in 2005 committed governments and the region’s Rainforest Aboriginal peoples to work together for recognition of the Aboriginal cultural heritage associated with these forests. The resultant heritage nomination process empowered community efforts to reverse the loss of biocultural diversity. The conditions that enabled this empowerment included: Rainforest Aboriginal peoples’ governance of the process; their shaping of the heritage discourse to incorporate biocultural diversity; and their control of interaction with their knowledge systems to identify the links that have created the region’s biocultural diversity. We recommend further investigation of theory and practice in Indigenous governance of international heritage designations as a means to empower community efforts to reverse global biocultural diversity loss.

The notion of cultural landscape has been accepted in the World Heritage Convention since 1992 but the adoption for World Heritage inscription is different among regions. This paper aims to address the issues of applying the concept of cultural landscape in Asia and the Pacific. The article first takes an overview of the World Heritage List and current issues related to the cultural landscape. This is followed by a discussion of the cultural landscape by referring to previous studies, with detailed analysis pointing out the major characteristics of the listed cultural landscapes in Asia and the Pacific, which are tabulated using the numerical data. The final discussion concludes by addressing the discourse on applying the World Heritage Convention and the current issues on cultural landscape conservation in Asia and the Pacific.

The imbalance of the number of sites listed as the cultural landscape in the World Heritage List is one of the major issues since cultural landscape was adopted in the World Heritage Convention in 1992. Though the List is supposed to adequately elicit the heritage diversity in the world, most of cultural landscapes in the List as well as the Tentative List are situated in Europe and North America region. To fill this gap, it would be useful to focus the analysis on the regions other than Europe and North America which would provide insights and understanding for the future strategy. This paper points out that one of the major factors on preparation for the nomination which influences the imbalance in the list is the political and economic stability in each state party. As for the cultural lands cape, this situation calls for attention from international action on heritage safeguarding. Moreover, the imbalance raises the question whether the existing guideline on cultural landscape identification is practical for the state parties. The landscape types proposed in this paper aims to add depth to the understanding on the existing categorisation of cultural landscape in the Convention. It focuses on the landscape setting based on the existing cultural landscapes in the World Heritage List. Seven cultural landscape types in both rural and urban setting landscape are discussed.

Smith, Anita and Kristal Buckley. 2007. Convict landscapes: shared heritage in New Caledonia. Historic Environment 20(2): pp. 27-31.

Sirisrisak, Tiamsoon and Natsuko Akagawa. 2012. Concept and practice of cultural landscape protection in Thailand. In K. Taylor and J. Lennon (eds.). Managing cultural landscapes. Routledge: Oxon. pp. 173-191.

For many centuries, mountains all over the world have been the focus of religious veneration and artistic production. They are what could be called ‘mountains of meaning’, mountains that have special meanings or spiritual values attributed to them, or mountains that inspire creative works or thoughts. The purpose of the 2002 ‘Celebrating Mountains’ conference was to rejoice at the diversity of mountains, and their meanings to our society. There can, perhaps, be no greater accolade than for a mountain to be included on the UNESCO World Heritage List: ‘sacred mountains are the World Heritage sites that enshrine the highest physical and spiritual values’ (Sernbaum 1997: 34). ‘Associative’ cultural landscapes are another type of property that the World Heritage Committee recognises. These too can have special meanings or spiritual values attributed to them, or are places that inspire creative works or thoughts. This category can also include mountains landscapes.