World Heritage Convention is recorded in this encyclopedia from the source named below.
Overview
The World Heritage Convention, formally the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, is an international treaty signed on 23 November 1972, which created the World Heritage Sites, with the primary goals of nature conservation and the preservation and security of cultural properties. The convention, a signed document of international agreement, guides the work of the World Heritage Committee. It was developed over a seven-year period (1965–1972). The convention defines which sites can be considered for inscription on the World Heritage Sites list, sets out the duties of each country's governments to identify potential sites and to protect and preserve them. Signatory countries pledge to conserve their World Heritage Sites, report regularly on the state of their conservation and if needed, to restore the sites. The convention also sets out how the World Heritage Fund is to be used and managed. It was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on 16 November 1972, and signed by the President of General Conference of UNESCO, Toru Hagiwara, and the Director-General of UNESCO, René Maheu, on 23 November 1972. It is held in the archives of UNESCO.
Source and reuse
The descriptive text above is drawn from the English-language encyclopedia article World Heritage Convention, reused under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and attributed in the sources block on this page. Figures in the infobox come from Wikidata and carry that project's own provenance; they should be checked against the cited source before being relied on.
Editorial note
This record is a sourced summary, not original research. Where the underlying material is silent on a point, this article is silent too. Last reviewed 2026-09-23.