ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the more specific threats faced by World Heritage sites today before discussing the largest threat to World Heritage, tourism, and humanity as a whole – global climate change. Increasingly, negative impacts from climate change have been identified as a rapidly approaching threat, and this chapter highlights how this will impact World Heritage sites and tourism. Given how vulnerable these threats make World Heritage, the chapter then moves into a discussion on the inadequacies of the World Heritage system in its current form, particularly in regard to conservation issues. Finally, the chapter throws into the spotlight some of the problems associated with the linking of World Heritage and tourism, and the suitability of tourism at World Heritage sites, particularly given the stated goals of the World Heritage Convention, is questioned.
