ICOMOS Culture-Nature Prize 2022 Winners

Nature-Culture

ICOMOS has the pleasure of announcing the 2022 winners of the ICOMOS Culture-Nature Prize, funded by your donations to our Giving Tuesday 2021 fundraising campaign.

This year, 5 outstanding Culture-Nature initiatives undertaken by our members have been awarded for their significant contributions to the heritage field in innovative and effective ways.

Culture-Nature initiatives recognise the interconnections between cultural and natural heritage and rethink how we can protect culture and nature through a comprehensive approach with local communities. Through integrated protection, management and sustainable development of our heritage places, Culture-Nature initiatives build resilience to today’s challenges of climate change, pollution and rapid urbanisation.

ICOMOS received 31 applications for the Culture-Nature Prize from all five geographical regions, with a majority from the Asia and the Pacific region. The Jury carefully considered the applications according to the evaluation criteria: impact, community engagement and innovation.

The Jury decided to award three Prizes and two Special Mentions.

Prize Winners:

1^st Place (6000€): Maya Biocultural Landscapes: Co-creating an Illustrated Dictionary and a Species Inventory, Guatemala

Deep in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, the San Bartolo murals, the oldest and most complex Maya artwork in situ, depict an origin mythology within an animate tropical forest landscape. The prize money will fund the creation of an illustrated dictionary of the murals’ biota and topographic features. It will be paired with a “Species Inventory” from a 300 km2 area surrounding the site, interconnecting the tangible and dynamic natural world with complex ancient and contemporary beliefs, traditional knowledge systems, ethnolinguistics, and community histories. In addition, this will fund workshops with the Indigenous community.

2^nd Place (6000€): Safeguarding of Sacred Masks through the Practice of Early Brushfires, Burkina Faso

This project supports the efforts of the nuni communities of sacred masks in their actions of sustainable safeguarding and transmission of heritage. Every three years, these communities practice a great ritual ceremony in a sacred forest, combining sacred masks and early brushfires, on the occasion of which culture and nature become a single entity. The prize money will help local communities to continue to fund this ritual ceremony.

3^rd Place (3000€): Protection of Traditional Gardens in Qazvin, Iran

This initiative aims to protect traditional gardens in Qazvin, Iran. Team members consisting of representatives of associations active in areas related to the city's historic gardens will assist gardeners and farmers and inform the citizens about the garden’s cultural assets by holding social, cultural and artistic events, in order to reduce the amount of intentional destruction of the gardens. The prize money will help raise awareness in order to establish a legal structure to continue an existing practice of community gardening.

Special mentions:

- 4^th Place tie (2500€ each):

Sustaining Nature Culture Journey through Generations of Communities of the Namdapha National Park Region, India

The indigenous communities living in the Namdapha National Park region of eastern Arunachal are advanced in terms of their education, biodiversity knowledge and cultural skills. Their traditional medicinal knowledge, weaving, basketry, and house-making skills reflect their self-sufficiency and coexistence with nature. The prize money will support the developement and the implementation of a curriculum for the transmission of their culture and traditions through classroom education and workshops in the local community school.

Public-Based Monitoring of Cultural Heritage in Yanqing UNESCO Global Geopark, China

Located in the mountainous Yanqing District of Beijing, the programme, launched in 2018, aims at promoting public awareness and education of heritage conservation while enabling local people to look deeply into the interrelation between the natural and cultural environment they live in. A cooperative network has been established to promote public-based heritage monitoring, heritage inspection training, and preventive conservation practices through the use of technology. The prize money will contribute to fund workshops with community volunteers, who are already being trained how to document growth on the Great Wall of China with an applet.

This year, we are relying on your generosity again to help our members continue their inspiring work through the 2023 ICOMOS Culture-Nature Prize. Our goal is to raise another 15 000€ on Giving Tuesday 2022, 29 November 2022, to fund next year’s prize winners.

You can already find more information and donate to Giving Tuesday 2022 on this page.