The Latest Breaking News from World Heritage

Along the border of Brazil and Argentina, the Iguazu River widens, slows, and then drops. The land simply falls away. Iguazu Falls stretches roughly 2.7 kilometres across a basalt plateau, forming what is generally described as the largest waterfall system in the world. Around 275 individual cascades make up the…

A 58,000-hectare Australian expanse containing some of the world's oldest evidence of animal life could be included on the prestigious World Heritage list.

A team from Plastic Odyssey and Unesco have carried out a mission to map plastic waste, test removal methods and establish monitoring protocols on the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles. It is one of 51 marine areas listed as a World Heritage Site, increasingly under threat from plastic pollution.

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay called the moment 'historic', noting that Samarkand is often described in literature as one of the world's most luminous cultural crossroads.

The arrival of the deadly H5 strain in Australia is considered inevitable despite the remoteness of Heard Island, where unusual numbers of seal pups have died

Since 2020, the conservation outlook has worsened for four of Australia’s 16 natural World Heritage properties – Ningaloo, Shark Bay, Purnululu National Park and the Australian Fossil Mammal Sites. This means 25% of our natural areas globally recognised as being significant are either in worse health or need better planning…

Botswana’s fertile Okavango Delta is one of the last remaining high-biodiversity ecosystems in the world, home to cheetahs, African wild dogs, baobab trees, crocodiles, termites and owls that catch fish. Roughly the size of the state of Connecticut, the freshwater Okavango Delta opens into an enormous alluvial fan that stretches…

An Egyptian antiquities professor and a Congolese economist are competing to become the new director of UNESCO

The UN's scientific and cultural agency, Unesco, faces criticism for being slow, politicised and short of funds. As it prepares to choose a successor to its French director general, Audrey Azoulay, on Monday, Congolese veteran Firmin Édouard Matoko tells RFI that his three decades inside the organisation are an asset…