Progress toward the sustainable development of world cultural heritage sites facing land-cover changes

Huadong Guo; Fulong Chen; Yunwei Tang; Yanbin Ding; Min Chen; Wei Zhou; Meng Zhu; Sheng Gao; Ruixia Yang; Wenwu Zheng; Chaoyang Fang; Hui Lin; Ana Pereira Roders; Francesca Cigna; Deodato Tapete; Bing Xu

doi:10.1016/j.xinn.2023.100496

Progress toward the sustainable development of world cultural heritage sites facing land-cover changes

Innovation (Camb). 2023 Aug 12;4(5):100496. doi: 10.1016/j.xinn.2023.100496. eCollection 2023 Sep 11.

Authors

Huadong Guo^{1

2}, Fulong Chen^{1

3

2}, Yunwei Tang^{1

3}, Yanbin Ding⁴, Min Chen⁵, Wei Zhou^{1

3

2}, Meng Zhu^{1

3

2}, Sheng Gao³, Ruixia Yang^{1

3

2}, Wenwu Zheng⁴, Chaoyang Fang⁶, Hui Lin⁶, Ana Pereira Roders⁷, Francesca Cigna⁸, Deodato Tapete⁹, Bing Xu¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China.
² International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage Under the Auspices of UNESCO, Beijing 100094, China.
³ Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China.
⁴ Cooperative Innovation Center for Digitalization of Cultural Heritage in Traditional Villages and Towns, Hengyang Normal University, Hengyang 421010, China.
⁵ School of Geography, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China.
⁶ Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Wetland and Watershed Research, Ministry of Education & School of Geography and Environment, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China.
⁷ Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, 2600 AA Delft, the Netherlands.
⁸ Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC), National Research Council (CNR), Via del Fosso del Cavaliere 100, 00133 Rome, Italy.
⁹ Italian Space Agency (ASI), Via del Politecnico snc, 00133 Rome, Italy.
¹⁰ Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

Abstract

The quantification of the extent and dynamics of land-use changes is a key metric employed to assess the progress toward several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that form part of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. In terms of anthropogenic factors threatening the conservation of heritage properties, such a metric aids in the assessment of achievements toward heritage sustainability solving the problem of insufficient data availability. Therefore, in this study, 589 cultural World Heritage List (WHL) properties from 115 countries were analyzed, encompassing globally distributed and statistically significant samples of "monuments and groups of buildings" (73.2%), "sites" (19.3%), and "cultural landscapes" (7.5%). Land-cover changes in the WHL properties between 2015 and 2020 were automatically extracted from big data collections of high-resolution satellite imagery accessed via Google Earth Engine using intelligent remote sensing classification. Sustainability indexes (SIs) were estimated for the protection zones of each property, and the results were employed, for the first time, to assess the progress of each country toward SDG Target 11.4. Despite the apparent advances in SIs (10.4%), most countries either exhibited steady (20.0%) or declining (69.6%) SIs due to limited cultural investigations and enhanced negative anthropogenic disturbances. This study confirms that land-cover changes are among serious threats for heritage conservation, with heritage in some countries wherein the need to address this threat is most crucial, and the proposed spatiotemporal monitoring approach is recommended.