作者机构：
International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China;[Sheng Gao] Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China;International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage Under the Auspices of UNESCO, Beijing 100094, China;[Yanbin Ding; Wenwu Zheng] Cooperative Innovation Center for Digitalization of Cultural Heritage in Traditional Villages and Towns, Hengyang Normal University, Hengyang 421010, China;[Min Chen] School of Geography, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China
通讯机构：
[Fulong Chen] I;International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China<&wdkj&>Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China<&wdkj&>International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage Under the Auspices of UNESCO, Beijing 100094, China
摘要：
The quantification of the extent and dynamics of land-use changes is a key metric employed to assess the progress toward several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that form part of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. In terms of anthropogenic factors threatening the conservation of heritage properties, such a metric aids in the assessment of achievements toward heritage sustainability solving the problem of insufficient data availability. Therefore, in this study, 589 cultural World Heritage List (WHL) properties from 115 countries were analyzed, encompassing globally distributed and statistically significant samples of "monuments and groups of buildings" (73.2%), "sites" (19.3%), and "cultural landscapes" (7.5%). Land-cover changes in the WHL properties between 2015 and 2020 were automatically extracted from big data collections of high-resolution satellite imagery accessed via Google Earth Engine using intelligent remote sensing classification. Sustainability indexes (SIs) were estimated for the protection zones of each property, and the results were employed, for the first time, to assess the progress of each country toward SDG Target 11.4. Despite the apparent advances in SIs (10.4%), most countries either exhibited steady (20.0%) or declining (69.6%) SIs due to limited cultural investigations and enhanced negative anthropogenic disturbances. This study confirms that land-cover changes are among serious threats for heritage conservation, with heritage in some countries wherein the need to address this threat is most crucial, and the proposed spatiotemporal monitoring approach is recommended.
