UNESCO Releases People and Nature Report: How UNESCO Sites Sustain Biodiversity and Communities Worldwide

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.