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Monitoring of World Heritage from Space: an overview of UNESCO’s initiatives - Remote Presentation
Jyoti Hosagrahar
UNESCO, France
More than 50 years ago, in 1972, the World Heritage Convention was adopted by UNESCO’s General Conference, to protect the world's natural and cultural heritage considered to be of Outstanding Universal Value to humanity. That same year remote sensing from civilian Earth observation satellites began on a routine basis with Landsat 1.
While spatial information through aerial photographs has been broadly used in heritage management for a hundred years, the first applications of satellite and radar imagery in World Heritage sites date back to the 1990s. Since then, steady improvements in satellite imagery have enabled UNESCO and partners to broaden the use of these technologies to monitor and manage the contemporary global challenges affecting World Heritage properties, such as climate change, disasters, deforestation, overexploitation of natural resources, infrastructure development, pollution and rapid urbanization, among others.
The technological advancement continues at a fast pace, opening broad opportunities in the use of new tools such as artificial intelligence, and improving open access to data for it to be understood and used directly by the site managers and other heritage custodians.
To support this aim and in the spirit of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, UNESCO is engaged in strengthening and expanding collaborative partnerships with relevant institutions with a view to furthering the necessary institutional and individual capacity needed to make full use of spatial data, Earth observation satellite technologies and analysis tools for the monitoring of the state of conservation of World Heritage properties.
