World Heritage Site

We are awaiting the publication of the documents for the 2024 WHC session, which will become available online in about a month or so. These documents will not only give us the AB advisories for the 2024 nominations but also bring the full list of nominations for 2025 to the table. “Predicting” these possible new WHS has been a significant community effort of this website for years; it makes it possible to plan your travels by taking in the Upcoming Nominations.

So how good are we at predicting? Nominations aren't always as clearly announced as by this Chinese news outlet:

A bit of History

In 2009 we started from a document someone had found floating around on the web, and the years 2010 and 2011 saw similar patterns. For the WHC of 2012, a forum topic was started in late 2010: this was the first time a set of candidates was identified based on media sources before the official UNESCO document set was published.

Kyle/winterkjm now yearly makes neat lists based on crawling the web in various languages. His overviews and the forum topics invite others to amend these lists with sites they discovered themselves based on items in the news.

The results

I checked the entries for all years between 2012 and 2024 to measure how effective we are with our predictions. I took the final full listing of the predictions for each year on the Forum and compared this with the actual nominated list on the agenda of the WHC. After adding the numbers, I calculated the following two indicators:

1. Accuracy rate: the percentage of predicted sites that indeed did deliver a nomination on time and were deemed ‘complete’. This shows whether the sites we picked were right.
2. Completeness rate: the percentage of predicted sites measured against the actual total of new nominations. This shows the sites we overlooked in our discussions.

Have a look at the findings in this table:

I had to skip the years 2021 and 2023 as they were obscured by the double WHCs in these years. You can also see from 2020 and 2022 we could not get a clear view in those years.

So, overall, in our best years, we guessed about 70% of the nominations correctly. This creeps up to 80% if we don't consider the incomplete dossiers.

2024 as an example

When we look at the year 2024 as an example, we did not see these 8 coming:

• Burkina Faso: La Cour royale de Tiébélé (never named before except during the Missing WHS discussion)
• Ethiopia: Melka Kunture and Balchit (we noticed it as ‘waitlisted’ in 2021 as Ethiopia had submitted 2 dossiers that year; however we did not follow up after 2022)
• Romania: Brâncusi Monumental Ensemble of Târgu Jiu (been on the radar since identified as one of the sites of memory in 2019, but not followed up after 2022)
• Saudi Arabia: The Cultural Landscape of Al-Faw Archaeological Area (never brought forward)
• Serbia: Bac Cultural Landscape (never brought forward either)
• South Africa: The Pleistocene Occupation Sites (we saw it in 2016-2017)
• Russia: Testament of Kenozero Lake (only slightly mentioned during Missing WHS discussion)
• Bosnia Herzegovina: Vjetrenica Cave (we mentioned it for 2023 only, as it had an incomplete dossier in 2022)

We also lost 5 due to submitting incomplete dossiers: Murujuga Cultural Landscape (Australia), Mount Olympus (Greece), Modernist Centre of Gdynia (Poland), Cultural Landscape of the Andalusian Olive Grove (Spain) and Sunken City of Port Royal (Jamaica).

And we were wrong on these 6, which now are expected to be on the nomination list for 2025:

• Gola-Tiwai Complex (Sierra Leone)
• Gebel Qatrani Area (Egypt)
• Tilaurakot, the Archaeological remains of Ancient Shakya Kingdom (Nepal)
• Koytendag Mountain Ecosystem (Turkmenistan)
• The Complex of Relics and Landscapes of Yen Tu  (Vietnam)
• Isla de Flores Cultural Landscape (Uruguay)

How to predict better

Although we have become pretty good at predicting, it remains difficult as some countries have no accessible press outlets, or do not publish in one of the major global languages, which makes Googling for news items hard. Extensions often do not make the news and we miss those regularly. Also, nominations regularly occur a year earlier or a year later than we expected them – this is because of precise deadlines which we obviously cannot monitor firsthand.

My main takeaway of how we can predict better is to keep a more consistent eye on the number of WHS that are ‘Bubbling Under’. These are the sites that continue being active in the background, those who have been trying in the past decade and already did present something to the WHC Bureau: notably the incomplete dossiers, the ones Postponed/Adjourned, the ones in the Upstream Process and the ones receiving a financial budget to write a nomination dossier. I will start a new Forum topic for that (we’ve tried before until 2016).

Recent Referrals (not seen as often anymore since easily overturned at recent WHC) must also be looked at. Deferrals do more have the pattern of a fully new nomination and do not tend to stay under the radar.

And a final thought: I wonder whether we will be given insight into the requests for Preliminary Assessments in this year’s document set. The Preliminary Assessment, aiming at reducing the number of incomplete dossiers and smoothening the process to inscription overall, has been started in 2023. It is an extra step based on desk-based reviews, timed 1 year after a place has been added to the Tentative List and 1 year before WHS submission. These Assessments are voluntary up and until 2027, after which they will become mandatory. This would give us even better insight into which sites are in the pipeline.

Do you have other suggestions to improve our predictions?