On the 5th and 6th of November this year, our very own Dr Naima Benkari presented a keynote speech at the WHITRAP/HeritAP’s Annual meeting 2025.
In her keynote, she talked about “Heritage that Pays Its Way Fairly — From Advocacy to Shared Practice”.
In her presentation, Dr Naima Benkari revealed that the
Sustainable Development Goals are off track — and heritage communities are feeling it. In this keynote, the ICOMOS Sustainable Development Goals Working Group (SDGWG) makes a clear case: culture is not a nice-to-have. It is infrastructure for identity, resilience, and fair livelihoods, and it deserves a full place in development policy and finance.
Speaking in the opening session on “Heritage and SDGs in a Global Context,” Naima Benkari, the SDGWG Focal Point shows how the conversation is shifting from why culture matters to how it delivers:
- Through the #Culture2030Goal coalition, SDGWG is helping build a stand-alone culture goal for the post-2030 agenda — with real targets and indicators, not just mentions in footnotes.
- At MONDIACULT 2025 side event, and in the “Lost in the Metrics?” scientific session (ICOMOS Symposium Lumbini 2025), community and Indigenous voices pushed one message: count what matters for people’s rights, livelihoods, and living heritage, not just what’s easy to measure.
- The ICOMOS Policy Guidance on Heritage and the SDGs, now in more languages including Arabic, is guiding work to move beyond tourism monocultures, hard-wire equity, and keep heritage as a long-term asset.
- Partnerships with Blue Shield and the Climate Heritage Network are making climate risk, disaster preparedness, and “risk-ready livelihoods” concrete for sites and communities.
In her keynote, she
connects directly to WHITRAP/HeritAP’s arc: “Prosperity & Livelihoods” (2025) and “Knowledge & Skills” (2026) — proposing joint tracks on living heritage for livelihoods, fair tourism value chains, and skills modules that can be replicated across Asia–Pacific.
Looking ahead to COP30 and the global water agenda, the message is blunt and hopeful: prosperity that strengthens heritage is possible when equity and inclusion are the ground rules, not the afterthought.
To watch the full keynote presentation, you can follow our YouTube channel called ‘ICOMOS SDGWG’, or you can subscribe to the link channel linked to the file below:
HeritAP is a network of heritage practitioners of Heritage in the Asia-Pacific region is committed to establishing multiple connections among individuals, groups and institutions, and promoting the sharing of knowledge and experience in heritage protection and management.
Follow this link to get to know more about the HeritAB annual Meeting in 2025. The results of the HeritAP annual meeting are published as a booklet. You can download this booklet from the ‘Publication’ section of our website.
