World Heritage Site

After having already introduced pages showing community member statistics and those for each of the WHS sessions over the past months, I had similar ones for the countries left to do. Of course, countries can also be ranked on their 'performance'. Kyle (winterkjm) already shared a nice appetizer at the Forum this week, as he compared countries on 10 key data points. It is remarkable how similar South Korea and Portugal are in their patterns.

The country statistics are spread across 3 different pages, which can be accessed here. I will introduce each of them below.

Core data

The main overview page shows:

Size: the State Parties ranked by geographical size. I could have chosen population numbers or GDP as well, but (as did Kyle) I found ‘size’ the most interesting denominator. The largest countries with relatively few (<10) WHS are Kazakhstan, Algeria, DR of Congo and Saudi Arabia.

Country: a list of all ‘countries’ that have ratified the WH Convention. New is Nauru (see its pretty flag above), of which it was confirmed this week that they ratified last July. It became our 196th  “country”. The Cook Islands and Niue (both associated states with New Zealand) are the odd ones out, as they aren’t UN members (all others are either full or observer members). 5 out of the 196 are on all-zeros: no WHS, no TWHS, no other activity.

The numbers of WHS and TWHS per country.

The number of times the country has been a Member of the World Heritage Committee. Mexico and Egypt have the most occurrences; at 27, they have been present at the WHC for over 58% of its years. An outlier here is Lebanon, a country small in size, that nevertheless was a member at 22 sessions. Austria and Czechia are fairly large countries that never have participated.

The number of Community Members that have ‘completed’ visiting all WHS in the country. We have shown those already on individual pages, but this is the first full overview. 17 countries have been uncompleted so far, with Australia, UK and France suffering from remote islands syndrome and 5 countries where no one could even ‘tick’ their two WHS (Nigeria, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Gabon and the C.A.R. (photo 2 shows my 1 out of 2 for this country)). No less than 1052 people completed all WHS at the Holy See!

The number of reviews: it does say something about the popularity of a country. Germany is the number one here, probably due to the easy access to its WHS and many community members living nearby.

The average rating of the WHS in the country, already publicized earlier. A new one is the average approval rating of its TWHS; the future potential of Denmark, Belgium, Hungary and The Netherlands (to just name a few) doesn't look good. 

Most per decade

I also added a page 'Performance by Decade' where you can see the countries that added the most new WHS per decade. The ‘winners’ are: 

• 1978-1987: USA & India (both 17)
• 1988-1997: Italy (21)
• 1998-2007: China & Italy (both 16)
• 2008-2017: China (17)
• 2018-now: Germany (11)

If we consider the maximum of 1 new inscribed site per annum as the optimum, we notice that 13 countries overperformed in one or more decades. France, Spain and China even did so across 3 decades, and Germany in 4!

Level of success

Another page shows the most successful (and unsuccessful) countries in the nomination game.

• Perfect inscriptions: the countries with the most WHS (China, Italy) also have the most ‘perfect’ inscriptions (so without any debate: a recommendation of inscription by the advisory body, then inscribed at the first attempt.). 
• Sites that are or have been In Danger: here we find mostly countries tainted by war. Tanzania stands out as it has struggled with Ngorongoro, Kilwa Kisiwani, and (still) Selous.
• AB overruled: the countries that had to fight the hardest to get their site inscribed. If you have followed the debates in recent years, it’s no wonder that Iran tops this list. Since the inscription process has been smoothened over the years, it may tell us that Iran isn't successful in the pre-meeting exchange of ideas with the Advisory Bodies. India, Russia and Türkiye don't do well in that respect either.
• Incomplete dossiers: some countries just keep on trying without much result. Pakistan and Uzbekistan must be mentioned here. On the other hand, as I concluded in an earlier blog post, sending in an Incomplete Dossier isn't the end of the world - countries like Russia and Portugal got their sites inscribed on a later date anyway.

Do you have suggestions for other country-related WHS data that we could keep track of?