Role of Heritage Impact Assessment in Sustaining Historic Sites

Abstract

: Recently, Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) has been established as a tool for resolving issues that would promote World Heritage (WH) protection in line with sustainable development principles. The increase in HIA requests for impacted WH assets over the last several years indicates that a greater emphasis is being placed on HIA as a useful tool to aid in the management and conservation of cultural heritage against inconsistent development works. However, there was a shortage in the application of a sustainable and integrated impact assessment approach within HIA, which is a key challenge in different HIA projects. Therefore, this paper contributes to addressing the importance of integrating dimensions of sustainable development into the procedures of HIA in accordance with Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to be more holistic and sustainable. At first, a literature review was conducted to address the different procedures of HIA and how they could be integrated into a more holistic model of impact assessment that considered sustainable development dimensions. Then, AHP analysis was performed with three experts in the heritage conservation field to address the importance of each dimension within the novel model.