UNESCO withdraws the first site from its world heritage list; others may follow

In the shadow of St. Lucia's twin Piton mountains, in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the sounds of night echo off the soaring volcanic spires and out over the protected bay. It's not a chorus of crickets, though—it's Madonna's "Holiday," performed by a resort cover band. During the day, tour helicopters thwack overhead while sunburned vacationers stake out thatched palapas at the Jalousie Plantation Resort, where oversized in-room brochures let them in on the secret of "why a villa in a World Heritage Site is a world-class investment."

Villas? In a World Heritage Site? Most travelers aware of UNESCO's coveted World Heritage designation think that it confers some sort of protected status on a site. It does not.

"World Heritage designation doesn't limit, per se, the ability to change the status of the property," explains Erika Harms, the UN Foundation's director of sustainable development. "It is an honorific," says Norma Barbacci, director of field projects for the World Monuments Fund, which provides funding to protect endangered cultural sites, some of which are on UNESCO's list. All preservation is coordinated and carried out by the country where the landmarks are located; the UNESCO World Heritage Committee has no jurisdiction over the sites. But while the committee can't tell countries how to manage these special places, it can express its disapproval over the condition of a site—and at its annual meeting this summer, it did.

Poaching and habitat degradation have whittled the oryx population of Oman's Arabian Oryx Sanctuary from 450 to 65 over the past decade, but it was the sultanate's plan to drill for fossil fuels there and shrink the property by 90 percent that forced UNESCO's hand. In an unprecedented move, the World Heritage committee struck the property from its list and, in so doing, issued an implicit warning to the other sites: It could happen to you.

"The committee concluded that the outstanding universal value for which the site had been inscribed on the World Heritage List was no longer present in the reduced area and therefore delisted the site," Guy Debonnet, a UNESCO program specialist explained after the meeting in New Zealand. "This enhances the credibility of the convention," notes Kishore Rao, deputy director of the World Heritage Centre (which oversees the committee), referring to the international treaty that governs the program. "It sends a very clear message about the consequences of neglect, lack of management, and destruction of the properties on the World Heritage List."

The committee has been warning Germany that plans for a four-lane bridge in Dresden's Elbe Valley, added to the World Heritage List in 2004, would lead to its deletion, too. It is giving the region's planners until October to come up with alternative plans—or face the ax. Local entities say this conflicts with UNESCO's policy of allowing local communities to manage their own sites. UNESCO disagrees.