New global dataset maps coastal World Heritage Sites under threat from rising seasFrom the Sydney Opera House to the ancient marshlands of southern Iraq, thousands of the world’s most treasured heritage sites sit close enough to the coast to face growing exposure to flooding and erosion as sea levels rise. That gap has finally been closed by the Global Coastal Heritage (Glo-CoH) dataset, published in Scientific Data, a journal of the Nature portfolio. The paper, “Mapping the global distribution of coastal World Heritage Sites: Glo-CoH, a new Global Coastal Heritage dataset”, digitised the boundaries of every UNESCO World Heritage property situated at or below 20 metres above mean sea level – the zone most exposed to coastal hazards. The result is a dataset of 1 250 individually mapped sites and component parts, covering more than 235 million hectares. “There has been no shortage of studies warning that heritage sites are exposed to climate change,” says Dr Simpson.