23 Mar Working paper on Sacred Sites and Protected Areas to the next IUCN Summit

On behalf of the IUCN WCPA Task Force on Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas and The Delos Initiative, B. Verschuuren, J.M. Mallarach and G. Oviedo, members of the Delos working group, will submit a working paper on Sacred Sites and Protected Areas to the next Summit of IUCN Categories of protected areas, to be held in Almería, Spain, from 7-11 May 2007. For more information please visit: http://www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa/theme/categories/summit/summit.html.

 The working paper proposes that sacred sites (including also sacred natural sites), which fit into national and international definitions of protected areas can, where appropriate, be recognised as legitimate components of protected area systems and can be attributed to any of the six IUCN protected area categories. At the same time, the paper suggests that cultural and spiritual values of protected areas should be better reflected in the whole range of categories, where at the moment are absent from or insufficiently recognised.