UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre Year: 2016 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Global Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer maps UNESCO World Heritage Sites — over 1,200 locations recognised worldwide for their outstanding cultural or natural significance, including ancient cities, architectural landmarks, distinctive landscapes and areas of exceptional biodiversity. It matters for nature-related risk because both the TNFD and the CSRD identify World Heritage Sites as biodiversity-sensitive areas, so operations in or near them attract heightened disclosure and scrutiny.

How it is built

The layer is drawn directly from the UNESCO World Heritage Sites inventory. Each site is inscribed on the basis of criteria assessing its outstanding universal value to humanity, covering cultural value, natural value, or both. The dataset represents these designated sites as mapped boundaries, with no derived score — inclusion follows official UNESCO inscription.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer. A site that intersects or lies near a World Heritage Site is flagged as overlapping a recognised biodiversity-sensitive or culturally significant area, warranting closer review under TNFD and CSRD expectations. There is no numeric scale — relevance is determined by spatial overlap or proximity.

Class thresholds

This is not a continuous physical-flux layer and has no numeric thresholds. It is a presence / boundary mask: the underlying feature is the official UNESCO World Heritage inventory (over 1,200 inscribed sites), stored as a vector layer of site boundaries and attributes (NAME, COUNTRY, REGION, CRITERIA, CATSHORT — cultural / natural / mixed) with no modelled score. There are therefore only two states for any location: inside (or near) a World Heritage Site, or outside it.

The single "class" is presence. There is no continuous quantity, no domain and no numeric break; relevance is determined purely by spatial overlap or proximity to an inscribed site. This is a contextual layer and is not used in materiality scoring (the TOML defines no proximity trigger), so no buffer distance is configured.

How these thresholds were set. There is no Darwin classification here: membership is taken verbatim from the UNESCO World Heritage inventory — a site is included if and only if it has been officially inscribed by UNESCO on the basis of its outstanding universal value. No breaks, bins or cut-offs are applied by Darwin.

Reference: UNESCO World Heritage Centre — whc.unesco.org.

Source

UNESCO World Heritage Sites — UNESCO interactive map and inventory.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This maps to WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter indicator S14_1 Protected/Conserved Areas, covering culturally and naturally designated sites. WWF derives its protected-area indicator from the global WDPA (UNEP-WCMC via IBAT); Darwin uses the UNESCO inventory directly. The two are aligned in intent, with Darwin treating World Heritage Sites as a distinct designated-site layer.

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-unesco-world-heritage-sites.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).