Operational guidelines - Proposed Changes to nominated sites pa.I was having a look through the justification for the proposed changes in the document as below
http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2016/whc16-40com-11-en.pdfPart of this is
"Table E - List of Nominations received to be examined by the Committee at its sessions between 2000
and 2015. Detail of States Parties having submitted more than 9 nominations."I was rather surprised to discover that UK is as high as 12th in this list with 18 nominations in the period. This places it behind - China 38, India 38, Germany 34, Russian Federation 33, France 29, Italy 29, Spain 26, Mexico 25, Iran 25, Israel 24 and Ukraine 18. A few other surprises too - I hadn't realised that Russia, Israel and Ukraine for instance had been quite so "active" in these years.
But can UK really have made 18 nominations during this period???
In fact UK had 11 new inscriptions -
The Historic Town of St George and Related Fortifications, Bermuda 2000
Blaenavon Industrial Landscape 2000
Dorset and East Devon Coast 2001
Saltaire 2001
New Lanark 2001
Derwent Valley Mills 2001
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2003
Liverpool - Maritime Mercantile City 2004
Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape 2006
Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal 2009
The Forth Bridge 2015
So - where does the 18 come from?? Well Darwin's Lab got "rejected"/withdrawn etc twice (2007/10) and Jarrow etc once (2012) - so that is 11 + 3 = 14.
It appears that changes in criteria and significant boundary alterations have also been counted
Then St Kilda got Natural Criteria added and followed by an additional cultural criterion (2004/5) and Gough etc got extended at the second attempt following a "withdrawal" (2003/4 . So 14 + 4 = 18
The figures used in this Table therefore need to be looked at with a little bit of care and understanding since they apparently include ALL nominations involving significant change and thus involving the AB in an evaluation - whether or not they are actually "New" sites or even re-nominations or "multiple failures".
This is not an unreasonable way of "counting" annual nominations to address the issue of cost of evaluation etc but can give the wrong impression in relation to the issue of altering geographical balance etc. UK actually nominated 14 "new" sites which could potentially maintain/increase the imbalance between "frequently" and "infrequently" nominating States. Still not an inconsiderable number but somewhat lower than the impression given by the headline figure.
I don't know to what extent similar factors inflate the headline numbers of other States at the top of the list. Certainly Ukraine isn't widely known as the "multiple inscriber" which its figure of 18 nominations might imply!! In fact it only had 5 new sites inscribed in the period chosen (and one of those was the trans-boundary Struve Arc). I haven't been able fully to account for the other 13 - Beech Forests had a withdrawal in 2004, Bukonvinian Metro had an incomplete in 2010, Saint Sophia had 2 deferrals in 2010/12, Bakhchysarai was incomplete in 2014/15. But that only adds 6 (= 11) - and can the report really have included nominations which weren't even looked at because they were "incomplete"??