Aerial view of a Waru Waru agricultural field in the Peruvian altiplano, where the ancient foodways and water management techniques of the Indigenous Aymara people offer strategies of climate resilience. Photo courtesy World Monuments Fund.
Last month, World Monuments Fund (WMF) announced its 2025 Watch, an advocacy campaign to raise awareness for threatened historic places and landscapes across the globe. This year’s selection panel of international experts was chaired by Lynn Meskell, a PIK Professor with appointments in the Department of Historic Preservation at Weitzman, the Department of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Penn Museum.
As the main advocacy tool for WMF, the Watchlist raises attention and funds for local communities seeking international intervention to protect their history.
“The Watch listens to the local communities, the people who have the greatest stake,” Meskell said at the Watch List Announcement on January 15. “So, here we’re actually seeing what ordinary people want and need, and how they want to collaborate.”
Lynn Meskell. Photo by Eric Sucar.
The 25 sites selected by the panel tell a story about the range of threats to global heritage: conflict, as in Gaza and Ukraine; climate change, as on the coastlines of Zimbabwe and Maine, USA; and the double-edged sword of tourism, as at the rock-cut grottoes of Maijishan and Yungang, China experiencing record numbers of visitors testing tenuous infrastructure. WMF’s first extraterrestrial site made the list, warning that increasing space exploration could pose a threat to humanity’s history on the moon.
“Over the next two years, the key focus of World Monuments Fund in relation to the Watch will be to work with all of our local partners and nominators to address these themes.” said Jonathan Bell, WMF’s Vice President of Programs, said at the launch event. “And so really, what that means is finding local solutions to what are ultimately global problems.”
The panel evaluated 215 nomination dossiers from 69 countries. Meskell participated as an expert panelist in 2023 before being invited back to chair this year’s panel. She says that in the selection, she tries to look past the “beauty contest” criteria that so many other lists fall victim to. She’s more interested in practical concerns: “Are they the right agency to do it?” she asks. “Are they the right people? Who’s going to benefit?”
For years, Meskell has studied the politics underlying international conservation work; her 2018 book chronicles a decades long history of how UNESCO, plagued by politicking, failed to live up to its utopian promise to protect historic sites through the exchange of conservation knowledge and resources. She argues that World Monuments Fund, unconstrained by international political pressures, does what UNESCO fails to do.
Unlike the UNESCO World Heritage list, WMF Watch sites aren’t nominated by nation-states, but rather by local communities and other stakeholders from civil society. What’s more, WMF often has pre-existing relationships with the NGOs, which the Watch funding will build upon.
“These are longer term commitments; they don’t have to wait for the Watch. World Monuments Fund is already working with the groups, and they do that quietly and collaboratively.”
Meskell says these bottom-up methodologies are key for building peace around sites that are often contested in addition to being under threat. Her 2023 study found that UNESCO inscription more often led to increased conflict within a 50km radius of the inscribed site. The exception was when the UNESCO site had also included WMF participation, which tended to result in more collaboration than conflict.
Ruins of Qasr al-Basha in Gaza City after a December 2023 airstrike, January 2024. Photo courtesy of Getty/Anadolu.
Meskell also called out the foresight to holistically address devastation in Gaza, where 63% of all heritage sites had sustained damage as of March 2024, but so much has been destroyed beyond heritage. In their partnerships in Palestine, WMF is treating heritage reconstruction as just one pillar of post-conflict recovery.
“They took a very broad and humanitarian view, which was not just select a couple of sites, but try and think of an overall plan for Gaza, more broadly, around reconstruction. So it’s not just picking a few monumental zones that are important.”
Taken as a whole, the list of 25 sites paints a thematic picture of the threats facing the different regions of the world. From WMF’s analysis of the 200+ nominations that were submitted, they identified regional themes, for example 78% of nominators from South America and the Caribbean identified tourism as a key force to be reckoned with, a double-edged sword that can draw attention and funding. 81% of nominators from sub-Saharan Africa identified climate change as a major force threatening heritage.
But Meskell says it was important to try modify the public’s perception of the breadth of these issues.
“It was very important to say, climate change is not just something that affects the Swahili coast. The US has this right on its doorstep, on its coastline, literally, and that as one of the greatest producers of the problem, it should be flagged there too.”
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