The Anthropocene has fuelled the biodiversity and climate change crisis. As a result, there is an unprecedented level of degradation, and loss of ecosystems and habitats for human uses. In Australia, there has been the highest level of mammal extinction of any continent over the past two centuries, and the highest rate of species decline. In this context how we protect species and habitats through regulatory regimes is a foremost concern.
The World Heritage Convention 1972 provides the highest level of international recognition, to protect valuable places which ‘transcend boundaries, cultures, and generations’. A World Heritage designation can be instrumental in preventing further habitat loss, and yet the World Heritage Convention arguably continues to perpetuate a nature/culture binary through the separation of these protected areas into ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ categories. A solution that attempted to address this binary issue was the introduction of a ‘cultural landscape’ category in 1992.
Of the 121 cultural landscapes currently on the World Heritage List, Australia only recognises two cultural landscapes, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and Budj Bim. Yet Australia is home to the oldest living culture in the world and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to maintain a close cultural, interconnected relationship with nature. In this paper we draw attention to an apparent incongruity and ask; is this an anomaly or does it represent a systemic problem in under-utilisation of the cultural land/waterscape concept? In answering this question, we provide a systematic review of the use of the cultural landscape category in an Australia setting. We argue that in an era of increased emphasis on sustainable goals and new priorities from the Convention on Biological Diversity for more protected areas, we need to pay critical attention to the usefulness of the cultural landscape protected area category.