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Rice Terraces
Places
Explore our cultural and natural heritage sites across the globe
Preserving Legacies is partnered with 10 cultural and natural heritage sites in 2023. These places of cultural significance, explored below, represent different heritage typologies, like archeological sites and living agricultural landscapes, and different climate threats, like sea level rise and extreme heat. While this diverse first cohort spans continents, cultures, and climate impacts, they all share a deep commitment to learn, connect, and build something new together.
Primary Sites
In the first year of Preserving Legacies, our two primary sites will go through a more robust program to link climate science and site conservation by enabling access to locally downscaled climate change models and organize a community-led workshop of the sites’ climate vulnerability as well as impacts on local communities.
Cadet Sites
In the first year of Preserving Legacies, eight cadet sites have been chosen to fully engage in climate heritage training and a peer-to-peer learning experience. Site custodians from these sites will shadow the full process at Petra and the Rice Terraces, including attending their workshops, to better prepare for their own assessments in 2024.
Phillipines
Rice Terraces
The Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras represented an outstanding example of human-environmental harmony and interaction. Located in the Philippine Cordillera mountain range on the northern island of Luzon, the site includes five outstanding examples of terraced landscapes where the local community have been growing and harvesting rice for hundreds of years. Built and maintained by the Ifugao, the terraces and wider landscape are at the centre of a vibrant and rich cultural tradition which includes both tangible and intangible cultural expressions. It is a living landscape, rich in history and tradition. The terraces are under threat from a range of factors including increased precipitation and storminess combined with social and economic pressures on the local communities.