Unesco has announced many new additions to the list of World Heritage sites, with 42 new places being anointed with the status.
The list aims to highlight the world’s most valuable historic sites and ensure the protection of their natural and cultural heritage (from various influences, including climate change, overtourism and building developments, among many other issues).
One significant addition to the list is the funerary and memory sites of World War I. Set in the north of Belgium and east of France, the 139 memorial sites grouped together by Unesco’s definition mark the Western Front, where German and Allied forces fought between 1914 and 1918. Within those sites, there are 133,027 Anzacs commemorated from across two World Wars, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
This inclusion follows a wider theme of the committee decisions, as the officials have looked to include more sites of commemoration (broadening the types of places that can receive Unesco World Heritage status). Memorial and museum sites marking major events within Mongolia, Argentina, Rwanda and a few other countries have also been added to the list.
Unesco states that in order for a site to be included on the list, it “must be of outstanding universal value”. The site must also meet at least one out of 10 points of selection criteria. It could represent a masterpiece of human creative genius, bear a unique testimony to a cultural tradition or civilisation, or be a site that represents a significant stage in human history or contains superlative natural phenomena to qualify (among many other potential principles).
