The World Heritage Committee, which is meeting at St. Petersburg in Russia, will decide on Thursday the heritage status of the Western Ghats. The discussion, originally scheduled for July 1, has been advanced. Western Ghats is being considered under the category “review and approval of retrospective statements of Outstanding Universal Value.”
The fate of India’s persistent campaign for 39 serial sites will be decided by a 21-nation panel. The committee, at its previous meeting in France last year, “deferred the examination of the nomination of the Western Ghats to the World Heritage List” for one year.
India will try to convince the panel that Western Ghats should be considered because they “represent two Global 200 priority eco regions that aren’t yet represented on the World Heritage List, and that have been identified as important gaps on the World Heritage List.”
Endemic species
Western Ghats has been seeking nomination under criteria 9 and 10 of the Operational Guidelines of the World Heritage Convention.
The Indian delegation will also draw strength for its campaign from the extracts of the technical evaluation report of the International Union for Conservation (IUCN).
Listing the exceptional species’ richness and endemism of the Ghats, as pointed out in the IUCN report, it will be stressed that the region is home to “some 5,000 vascular plant species, 228 freshwater fish species, 179 amphibians, 157 reptiles, 508 birds and 139 mammal species,” and a large number of them, endemic.
According to a dossier to be presented before the panel, “even if the nominated areas were to include only half of these species, their species richness and endemism would exceed that of most existing natural World Heritage properties in the region.”
Regarding the legal status of the nominated sites, it would be stated that all the 39 component parts of the “serial nomination fall under protection regimes ranging from tiger reserves, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and reserved forests.”
The Indian delegation will also argue that the nominated sites are “also key to the conservation of a number of threatened habitats.
Source:The Hindu 28 June 2012