Princess Dana Firas, President of the National Society for the Preservation of Petra, President of Icomos-Jordan, and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Cultural Heritage, sponsored the launch of the Heritage Preservation Project “The Future for Our Past”, yesterday, Sunday, at the association’s headquarters, “Beit Yaish”.
The idea of ​​the project comes in response to a call from National Geographic in 2021 for projects that focus on protecting cultural heritage sites that are threatened and affected by climate change or conflicts. sustainably, building the capacity of communities to protect sites at risk, as well as empowering local leaders to manage sites of cultural interest in general.
HRH Princess Dana Firas stressed the importance of answering the questions raised today about climate change and its impact on cultural heritage sites and the communities that live in and around them.
In this regard, Her Highness asked several questions, saying, “Are we ready to respond to this new normal, and deal with the formative challenges that we will face, and what can we do quickly enough to protect people and sites?”
For his part, Chief Commissioner of the Petra Development and Tourism Region Authority, Dr. Suleiman Al-Farajat, said that climate change is a global challenge, stressing the Petra Region Authority’s keenness to integrate local communities in decision-making and to benefit from the experiences of other countries in this field.
The project was implemented in two phases, the first: organizing a training workshop last March that focused on understanding the different values ​​of sites through charters and agreements and mapping the values ​​of the site, including heritage, community, economic, social and religious values.
The second phase included: hosting a group of experts and specialists to train a selected group of ten world heritage sites participating in the project and stakeholders to explore the state of fragility of heritage values, to determine the amount of benefit from the previously implemented training and an opportunity to exchange experiences.
The National Society for the Preservation of Petra works to promote best practices in the field of preserving cultural and natural heritage in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and beyond.
For more than thirty years, the association has been encouraging and promoting the approach to sustainable management of cultural heritage sites and the creation of a generation that is aware of the importance of its heritage and culture and is able to advance its society, as the association is based in its work on five main axes.
Those axes include: gaining support with regard to cultural heritage, conservation works and projects, as well as the association’s educational and awareness programs, economic and social development and community empowerment, in addition to climate heritage.
— (Petra)