About GHN

The purpose of the Global Heritage Network (GHN) is to raise awareness of, facilitate debate on and collaboratively seek solutions to the increasing threats facing cultural heritage sites in developing countries by connecting concerned citizens as well as experts and academics working in cultural heritage site conservation with each other in a dynamic, interactive and content-rich environment and to which GHN members can easily contribute their own data and experiences.

GHN thus aims to:

• Act as an early warning and monitoring system for threatened sites
• Seek solutions to those threats collaboratively
• Facilitate the implementation of solutions to mitigate the threats
• Report and monitor results of the solutions implemented

To achieve this, GHN brings together both experts in the field of heritage preservation and the general public to save endangered cultural heritage sites in the developing world by identifying the threats these sites face and then finding solutions to mitigate those threats.  While cultural heritage sites are under pressure in all countries, it is felt that the effort to protect and preserve those in developing countries are additionally hampered by the availability of fewer trained conservators in-country and the inability of states parties to commit the required funding.

But you can help:  visit the Get Involved page to learn how you can contribute to this effort.  By working together within the content-rich platform offered by GHN, further enhanced by discussion forums and social networking capabilities, we can collectively begin to save threatened sites in the developing world.

The website has been initially populated with all UNESCO Inscribed and Tentative List World Heritage sites in the developing world (as defined by the World Bank and comprising about 150 countries), over 1200 heritage sites in all.  Please note, though, that while we make every effort to keep the site listings up to date, the Tentative Lists are maintained by the states’ parties and can change at any time.  The sites are selected and nominated by the countries responsible for them as the most significant cultural heritage properties of “outstanding universal value” within their territories using six of 10 criteria (the final four criteria relate to natural sites).

Finally, please let us know if you find any inaccuracies on the GHN website.  While we have done our best to check everything, it is not always possible to catch all mistakes.  Also, while we monitor the contributions made to the website, we do not moderate all of the content so do notify us immediately if there is any offensive or inappropriate material posted.  All suggestions to improve this website are also gratefully accepted.

Thanks,

The GHN Team