Tag: World Heritage

Australia offers cash for Great Barrier Reef rescue ideas

SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — Australia is calling on the world’s top scientific minds to help save the Great Barrier Reef, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund research into protecting the world’s largest living structure. The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef is reeling from significant coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures linked to climate change. The 2,300-kilometre (1,400-mile) site is also under pressure from farming runoff, development and predatory crown-of-thorns starfish, with experts warning […]

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Scientists discover resilient ‘heart’ of Great Barrier Reef

MIAMI, United States (AFP) — Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is in peril from climate change and widespread bleaching, but scientists said Tuesday a small portion may be resilient enough to keep much of the rest alive. About three percent of the World Heritage site — home to the planet’s largest collection of coral reefs with 3,800 in all — has so far emerged relatively unscathed from a host of threats, from warming waters to pollution […]

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UNESCO to court controversy with World Heritage picks

by Joëlle Garrus Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — The Old City of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and a rare collection of futuristic buildings in Eritrea are among sites hoping to gain protected status from UNESCO when it meets in Poland from Sunday. The meeting of the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations’ scientific and cultural body in Krakow will also examine concerns about high-rise buildings that threaten the historic center of […]

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55 world heritage sites in danger

ABU DHABI, UAE (AFP) — Fifty-five out of a total of 1,052 heritage sites around the world feature on the UN cultural organisation’s World Heritage in Danger list. By listing such sites, UNESCO is seeking to mobilise the international community to protect them. During its 40th session in July, 2016, in Istanbul, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee added sites in Mali and Uzbekistan to the list, along with Libya’s five world heritage sites which have already […]

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Reprieve for Australian sub-Antarctic island station

by Martin PARRY SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — Australia’s permanent sub-Antarctic research base at World Heritage-listed Macquarie Island has won a reprieve from closure and will instead get a multi-million dollar revamp, the government said Friday, in a boost for science. The Australian Antarctic Division announced in September the station on the island — which lies in the Southern Ocean between Australia and Antarctica — would shut after almost seven decades due to environmental contamination concerns and […]

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