Scholar calls for World Heritage boost for Brazilian Amazon

by Natalia Costa

BRASILIA, July 31 (Xinhua) -- A Brazilian scholar says the Brazilian Amazon is underrepresented in terms of the World Heritage List and called for more curator individuals and organizations for the region.

"I believe the Amazon Region is underrepresented ... the Caatinga in the State of Ceara and the dunes in Brazil's Northeast Region," says Frederico Flosculo, an architecture professor at the University of Brasilia.

Brazil has eight sites on the Natural World Heritage List and only one is in the Amazon region.

The Central Amazon Protected Areas Complex covers an area of 60,000 square kilometers, but it is only 1.5 percent of the total of Brazilian Amazon, which has a land area of more than four million square kilometers.

In addition to supporting efforts to get more Amazonian sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, the Brazilian government should develop public policies to make sure that it is profitable to conserve the sites and that they involve local communities, Flosculo said in written answers to questions from Xinhua.

"The only way to preserve is educating. We need to constitute "curator populations,' as well as "curator organizations,'especially non-governmental ones, which may participate in the whole patrimonial management cycle," Flosculo wrote.

UNESCO announced Monday the creation of a regional center for Heritage management in Rio de Janeiro. The center will start offering courses to South American and African professionals in 2011.

"The decision to include a place, an architectonic ensemble in the World Heritage List should be the beginning of a major work on patrimonial education, on cultural tourism, on enhancing local cultural bodies," Flosculo said. "If this is not done, recognizing a site as a world heritage becomes a bureaucratic and void designation."

The 34th Meeting of the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO is going on in Brasilia and will run through Aug. 3. Participants are considering candidate sites for possible inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List and the status of some sites that could be put on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

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