Santo Domingo's old city goes first: piloting a climate toolkit for the world's heritage

The Colonial City of Santo Domingo — a World Heritage site since 1990, its grid of streets laid out in the earliest days of European settlement in the Americas — has become the first cultural property anywhere, and the first site in Latin America and the Caribbean, to pilot-test UNESCO's Climate Action Toolkit for heritage managers. Over five days in October, heritage, planning and climate specialists worked through ten practical exercises with UNESCO, ICCROM, ICOMOS and IUCN and the Dominican Ministry of Culture. The process, running into November, is expected to produce a Climate Action Plan for the historic centre: a shift from reacting to hurricanes, floods and rising seas after they strike to anticipating them while there is still time to protect both the stones and the people who live among them. A toolkit proved here becomes a template other historic cities can pick up.

SDG 11 · Sustainable cities and communities — Mechanism: institutional program