Progress toward the sustainable development of world cultural heritage sites facing land-cover changes

Graphical abstract

The quantification of the extent and dynamics of land-use changes is a key metric employed to assess the progress toward several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that form part of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. In terms of anthropogenic factors threatening the conservation of heritage properties, such a metric aids in the assessment of achievements toward heritage sustainability solving the problem of insufficient data availability. Therefore, in this study, 589 cultural World Heritage List (WHL) properties from 115 countries were analyzed, encompassing globally distributed and statistically significant samples of “monuments and groups of buildings” (73.2%), “sites” (19.3%), and “cultural landscapes” (7.5%).