PARIS: Almost three-quarters of the globe’s cultural and natural heritage sites are threatened by too little or too much water, the UN’s cultural agency said on Tuesday (Jul 1).<\/p>\n
As a result of rising temperatures, extreme weather events including hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves have become more frequent and intense, scientists warned.<\/p>\n
Seventy-three per cent of all 1,172 non-marine sites on the UNESCO Heritage List are exposed to at least one severe water risk, including water stress, drought, river flooding or coastal flooding, UNESCO said.<\/p>\n
“Water stress is projected to intensify, most notably in regions like the Middle East and North Africa, parts of South Asia and northern China \u2013 posing long-term risks to ecosystems, cultural heritage, and the communities and tourism economies that depend on them,” it added.<\/p>\n
Cultural sites were most commonly threatened by water scarcity, while more than half of natural sites faced the risk of flooding from a nearby river, the UNESCO study showed.<\/p>\n
In India, the Taj Mahal monument in Agra, for example, “faces water scarcity that is increasing pollution and depleting groundwater, both of which are damaging the mausoleum”, the study said.<\/p>\n
In the United States, “in 2022, a massive flood closed down all of Yellowstone National Park and cost over US$20 million in infrastructure repairs to reopen”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS: Almost three-quarters of the globe’s cultural and natural heritage sites are threatened by too little or too…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[2311,728,70,16,15,8406],"class_list":{"0":"post-230781","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-climate-change","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-united-nations"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}