Paris, France. UNESCO has released a new global report, People and Nature in UNESCO-Designated Sites: Global and Local Contributions, framing the network of more than 2,260 World Heritage Sites, Biosphere Reserves, and Global Geoparks as a single, planet-scale infrastructure for biodiversity, climate stability, and the communities that depend on them. Across an area larger than China and India combined, the report finds these sites are holding the line on species loss even as wildlife populations elsewhere continue to collapse.

A network bigger than two countries

This is the first UNESCO report to assess all three of its place-based designations as one network rather than as separate categories. Combined, they cover more than 13 million square kilometers across every region of the globe, and the report makes the case that this scale, more than any single site’s size, is what gives the network its power as a conservation tool.

Holding the line on biodiversity

The biodiversity finding is the headline. UNESCO-designated sites contain more than 60 percent of globally mapped species, and roughly 40 percent of those species are found nowhere else on Earth. While global wildlife populations have fallen by 73 percent since 1970, populations within UNESCO sites have remained comparatively stable. In an era of accelerating extinction, that gap between inside and outside the network is the kind of signal conservation policy is built on.

A carbon reservoir on the scale of decades

The same sites store an estimated 240 gigatons of carbon, equivalent to roughly two decades of current global emissions if released. Their forests alone account for about 15 percent of the carbon absorbed by forests worldwide each year. As governments search for credible nature-based pathways to meet climate targets, the report essentially points at a network already doing the work.

Nearly 900 million people, more than 1,000 languages

UNESCO-designated sites are not empty wilderness. Roughly 900 million people live within or depend on these areas, about 10 percent of the global population. The report documents more than 1,000 languages spoken across the network. At least 25 percent of UNESCO sites encompass Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories, a figure that rises to nearly 50 percent in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The inclusion is not incidental: the report links cultural and linguistic diversity directly to ecological resilience, and treats the two as a single system.

An economic story, too

The report estimates that around 10 percent of global GDP is generated in or near these zones, through tourism, fisheries, agriculture, and the ecosystem services that downstream economies rely on. That number reframes the policy conversation: protecting these sites is not just an environmental cost line, it is a question of where a meaningful share of the world’s economy actually sits.

What climate ambition buys

One of the report’s most striking findings is forward-looking. Every 1°C of warming avoided could halve the number of UNESCO sites exposed to major disruption by the end of the century. The implication runs both ways: ambitious mitigation protects the network, and protecting the network buys time for everything that depends on it.

What UNESCO is asking for

The report calls for treating UNESCO-designated sites as part of the global infrastructure for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Paris Agreement, and the post-2020 sustainability targets, rather than as standalone heritage assets. It also calls for stronger investment in community-led management, Indigenous co-stewardship, and long-term monitoring across the network.

In a year of mounting evidence that biodiversity and climate goals are slipping out of reach, People and Nature in UNESCO-Designated Sites offers a rare counterweight: a network that, by the numbers, is still working.

Read more about the report and access the Press Corner for releases, factsheets, and rights-free imagery at unesco.org.

Adapted from UNESCO’s report “People and Nature in UNESCO-Designated Sites: Global and Local Contributions,” released April 21, 2026. Press contact: François Wibaux, Press Officer for Science, Oceans and Biodiversity, UNESCO. Photo credit: UNESCO.

Tunisia is named after Tunis. Not the other way around. If the country takes its name from the city, then any attempt to understand Tunisia must start in Tunis.

Before reading any further, look at a map. You must appreciate the exceptional location of Tunis; only then does the city make full sense. Historically, Tunis was little more than a compact nucleus pressed in the strip of land between the Séjoumi lagoon (a flamingo sanctuary) and Lake Tunis, once the natural harbour. Everything that now feels expansive, avenues, neighbourhoods, infrastructure, rests on land reclaimed from water. Bab Al-Bhar, the Sea Gate, crystallises this transformation: standing there today, flanked by white buildings, you have to imagine the water once visible straight through the gate. The city quite literally stole land from the sea as it expanded.

That tension between land and water, between natural geography and human intervention, repeats itself everywhere in Tunisia. An artificial peninsula appears in the ancient harbours of Carthage. Salt lakes replace vanished seas in Chott el Djerid. Urban coastlines are pushed back, fortified, paved over. Today, the landscape bears the marks of centuries of negotiation with water, sometimes reverent, sometimes violent. But let’s stay in the capital for a moment.

Visiting the medina (old town) on a Sunday, when most souks are closed, made the architecture audible. Without the commercial noise, proportions, light and texture take over; the business-day buzz is thrilling, but silence teaches you how the city breathes. That quiet also sharpens your attention to thresholds. And then the beauty of the doors hits you. Again and again. Painted, carved, symbolic, they demand to be read, often concealing unexpected worlds behind them. In the medina, access is never guaranteed: museums may still be family homes, so you knock, you wait and someone might let you in. Knowledge survives through generosity. This constant negotiation between private and public space explains why repurposing feels so natural here. People inhabit ancient burial sites, former shrines become cafés and even the old slave market has transformed into the jewellers’ quarter; history reused rather than erased. The twenty madrasas scattered through the medina embody this logic perfectly: still embedded in daily life, neither fully public nor entirely private, their doors test your luck. Finally stepping inside one felt unreal, courtyards opening suddenly, tiled interiors that seemed imagined rather than constructed. I honestly felt I was dreaming.

But don’t forget to look up, as architecture constantly communicates power, belief and belonging, often far more than we initially perceive. The green-tiled domes signalling burial places, the octagonal or patterned motifs minarets proclaiming variants of Islam (Ottoman and Almohad respectively) or the colour codes identifying hammams and barber shops all speak a visual language that locals instinctively read. In Tunis, belief is never private, it is inscribed into skylines and façades.

That inscription extends inward. Mosques feel less like austere institutions than wellness centres, spaces of rest, learning and calm. Mats are placed against ancient columns to shield people’s backs from the cool marble. I even witnessed people nap inside Al-Zaytuna. So much peace that you can sleep. How do churches compare?

Al-Zaytuna itself is the city’s anchor, the Great Mosque. The souks grew around it, originally as little more than rented awnings, now covered streets wrapping commerce around devotion. You walk through trade and suddenly stumble into the sacred. Built in the seventh century, shortly after the Islamic conquest of Byzantine Africa, the mosque stands on layers of belief. While it is likely that a temple existed here since antiquity, legend says it was built on the shrine of Saint Olive of Palermo. “Zaytuna” means olive, in Arabic and in Spanish. Language preserves memory even when stones are repurposed. Indeed, the entire prayer hall is held by a forest of Roman columns and capitals, older worlds literally supporting newer ones.

As a Spaniard, Tunisia had many a surprise in store for me. Rue des Andalous reveals one of Tunisia’s most consequential migrations. During the Middle Ages, much of Spain was Muslim. Forced conversions, expulsions and finally the mass expulsion even of Moriscos (former Muslims converted to Christianity) in 1609 drove tens of thousands across the sea. Spain was Al-Andalus in Arabic and so these Spaniards became known as “Andalusians”. Large numbers settled in Tunisia, founding neighbourhoods and entire industries. That legacy is not abstract. Chechias, the characteristic red felt hats associated with Tunisois men, were produced using techniques brought by Andalusian refugees. By the nineteenth century, chechia makers were among the wealthiest and most influential merchants in Tunis. The Tunis souks where you can still watch them work are living archives of forced migration turned cultural inheritance. Indeed, the link with Al-Andalus is still emotionally present. Several people called me “cousin” when I told them I was Spanish. It did not feel metaphorical. It felt familial. Spanish presence resurfaces repeatedly: forts at La Goulette, inscriptions in Castilian, Andalusian refugees founding towns like Testour, where the mosque clock runs backwards (‘anticlockwise’) like Arabic script. Jewish and Muslim Spaniards built whole towns together after fleeing persecution. They brought urban planning, architecture, food and memory.

Non-human animals are also everywhere if you know where to look, silently narrating human history. Today, cats dominate Tunis, lounging, glamorous, fully at home in the city. But North Africa was once also home to another feline: lions, ultimately erased from the landscape by hunting. At the Bardo museum, Roman mosaics celebrate them while also depicting their mass slaughter in amphitheatres. Venationes (gladiatorial hunting shows) paved the way to extinction long before modern poaching. Rome’s “games” were ecological disasters disguised as entertainment. El Djem boasts the third largest amphitheatre in the world, an uncomfortable reminder that the spectacle of violence against animals became industrial. Birds, too, mark survival. Storks now nest on electrical poles, thanks to recent conservationist efforts, and the ancient castle on the artificial Chikly island in Lake Tunis is now a natural reserve for over fifty-seven species.

Water management reveals another continuity of power. Ancient Carthage was defined by water engineering. Artificial harbours, commercial and naval, remain legible after 2,200 years. Aqueducts carried water across vast distances; cisterns stored enough to sustain one of the Mediterranean’s largest cities. Fresh water was sacred. Springs, such as that at Zaghouan, were divine. Nymphs were believed to guard the source so temples rose where water emerged from the rock. But human transformations of the landscape sometimes rival natural phenomena. Chott el Djerid, now a salt desert, was once part of the Mediterranean Sea. When geological shifts cut it off, the water evaporated, leaving salt behind. The salt is now actively extracted and shipped north, sold to Scandinavian countries as grit to combat icy roads. At the same time, visions of reversing this desiccation persist, from colonial-era schemes to the revival of the “Sahara Sea” project in the 2010s, approved by the Tunisian state in 2018. Coastlines have also been shaped by humans. Hammamet’s medina once met the waves directly. Boulders and walkways intervened. Monastir’s ribat once stood on the beach before roads severed it from the sea. Sousse’s medina now violently cut away from the Mediterranean. Tunisia has never stopped imagining how to reshape water.

Just as water and animals shape human settlement, so too does climate. Again and again in Tunisia, habitation reveals extraordinary adaptation to environment. At the ancient site of Bulla Regia, houses were built partly underground to escape heat, flooding interior spaces with light while sheltering them from extremes. At Matmata, troglodyte dwellings carved into the earth have stabilised temperature in a harsh desert landscape for centuries. At Zriba Olia, a town only abandoned decades ago, Amazigh (Berber) architecture merges seamlessly with mountain rock: the house ends, the mountain begins. Even the Roman theatre at Dougga takes perfect advantage of the mountain’s elevation. These are not picturesque oddities; they are intelligent, time-tested responses to landscape. But changes aren’t always benign, especially when colonial brutality is concerned. In Carthage, Roman policy deliberately buried, erased and levelled the Punic past on Byrsa Hill. Centuries later, French authorities turned amphitheatres into chapels, erected cathedrals atop Punic acropolises and even built a farmhouse on the Roman capitol at Oudna. Layers of civilisation were literally crushed to assert dominance. The irony is that archaeology eventually resurrected what imperial ideology tried to annihilate.

Language binds all of this astonishing diversity together. Phoenician (Punic) script underpins our Latin alphabet. Tifinagh survives among Amazigh communities. Writing systems are fossils of contact. Even humour reveals linguistic layering: Tunisians seem to have the worst, and best, wordplay, producing gems like “Pub-elle”, “Bar Celone” or “Mec Anic”, jokes cleverly built on French that land perfectly in Tunisian streets. Religion, too, refuses neat boundaries. Phoenician deities merge with Egyptian, Persian and Roman gods. Judaism flourished in North Africa from antiquity and remained deeply rooted in Tunisia until the twentieth century. Christianity arrived early, fractured into multiple denominations and left basilicas, cathedrals and martyrs’ narratives across the landscape. Islam absorbed, adapted and reinterpreted what came before. Syncretism is not the exception here, it is the rule.

By the end, what remains clearest is this: Tunisia is not a palimpsest with erased layers. It is an accumulation where nothing disappears entirely. Former seas leave salt. Empires leave infrastructure. Migrations leave words, recipes, and cousins!

Sixteen days is nothing.
And it was everything.

Written by: Fernando Nieto-Almada

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fernando read History at university in London and Paris and currently teaches Languages. You can follow him on Instagram here.