Does the Aral Sea Merit Heritage Status?
Glantz and Robert Figueroa (U Colorado-Boulder) collaborated on this manuscript, which relates Aral Sea degradation to world heritage issues. In 1972, the UN developed the World Heritage Convention, in recognition of the need to protect valuable cultural and natural sites of global importance. Although the Aral Sea has not yet been proposed by any of the Central Asian states as a world heritage site, it meets many of the criteria designated by the Convention. This paper shows the potential for using world heritage processes to strengthen international drives for a more sustainable approach to the resolution of environmental and cultural problems. It was published in the December 1997 issue of Global Environmental Change. Since then, it has been translated into and published in Russian by UNEPCOM and has also been translated into the Karakalpak language of Central Asia, since the Karakalpak people (who live in Uzbekistan) are the most adversely affected by the Aral Sea crisis.
