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UNESCO's Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) (Convention) provides the highest level of international recognition for outstanding universal heritage places. While the Convention has been instrumental in aiding heritage preservation, arguably it has also reinforced a problematic 'culture' and 'nature' division in protected area management. This is not a new observation. One solution that attempted to address this issue was the introduction of the World Heritage (WH) 'Cultural Landscape' category in 1992. Yet, as of 2023, there are only 127 Cultural Landscape properties of the total 1157 properties on the WH List (10.9%). Poor recognition of the category appears particularly acute in some regions, such as Australia-Oceania, and in this paper, we consider this apparent under-utilisation with a systematic review of the literature about the category. Our analysis reveals significant and concerning regional variations in both use of the cultural landscape category and in research about it. In our current era, when better recognition of First Nation heritage is demanded, and when greater protection of heritage assets is required, further uptake of the Cultural Landscape category has the potential to redress these pressing societal concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of wetlands as places worthy of protection has been recognised since at least 1975, with the passage of the global wetland treaty, the Ramsar Convention (officially the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat). However, over the past 50 years wetlands have declined and at least 35% of natural wetlands have been lost with more at risk of extinction. Unfortunately, wetland habitats continue to suffer, despite the existence of protection regimes. In this context, this paper invites us to push the way we think about current wetland regulation and protection. Contemporary conceptions of wetlands that underpin dominant protection and management regimes tend to characterise wetlands in a way that overlooks all essential elements of the ecosystem. Our concern is to illuminate the plight of wetland ecosystems as interconnected waterscapes requiring more than a selective or partial regulative protection effort. We argue for a ‘rights of wetlands’ framing for a more holistic approach to regulate the management of these key ecosystems. We situate our argument using a Ramsar-listed wetland example, the Towra Point Nature Reserve, located in Botany Bay (Kamay), Sydney, Australia. Ultimately, we invite a recalibration of regulatory efforts for wetland conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly work in the field of legal geography has grown dramatically in recent decades. While much legal geography scholarship has been influenced by a European-North American perspective, we argue that a distinctive legal geography scholarship also emanates from outside the dominant perspective. Here, we review research from Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa and label this work as Antipodean legal geography (ALG). We suggest ALG research has made a significant contribution to global legal geography scholarship through an emphasis on environmental law and policy problem solving and through efforts to de-colonialise and expand legal geography's remit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian conservation targets commonly focus on preserving a vaguely defined ecological baseline, often conceptualised as a pre-European, 'natural' state. For instance, environmental legislation protects 'Endangered Ecological Communities' (EECs), which purportedly represent remnants of naturally occurring biota. However, EECs are often classified without long-term data, making it unclear as to whether the community being protected is indeed 'natural'. In this essay, we use history, ecology, and geography to map the long-term socio-environmental evolution of Sydney's freshwater wetland EECs, which were once key features of Australia's biggest city. Our data show that today's remnant wetlands are different from those of the early 1800s, highlighting how quickly landscapes can be misremembered. We encourage a reimagining of these wetlands not as snapshots of the past, but as human-impacted places with educational, ecological and historical importance. Our work emphasises the relevance of long-term, cross-disciplinary data for effective conservation, while highlighting limitations in post-colonial land management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unprecedented bushfire activity is increasing around the world. A catastrophic bushfire event in the Australian summer of 2019–2020 burned over 18 million hectares. The Australian bushfires were just one set of events among many across the globe. Cumulatively, the losses are extraordinary: from losing over a quarter of the Pantanal wetland in South America to California's Sierra Nevada and losses in the Amazon Forest. Bushfire destruction means a concomitant loss of biological diversity. Increased fire activity and frequency can adversely affect adaptive capacities of flora and fauna. Accordingly, across the globe, fire management practices and mitigation strategies are under increased scrutiny. In this article, we consider the extent to which one fire suppression strategy, prescribed burning, takes account of non‐human considerations. Our examination of policy settings provides policymakers with a way to account for non‐human interests. Our focus is Australia, specifically relating to one national park within New South Wales. Across the world, fire containment strategies must be reassessed to decipher how well non‐human considerations are placed to withstand changing fire regimes. With likely increases in bush and wildfire activity across the globe, associated with Anthropocentric climate change, there is an urgent need to account for non‐human interests in prescribed burning policies and regulations. With likely increases in bush and wildfire activity across the globe, associated with Anthropocentric climate change, there is an urgent need to account for non‐human interests in prescribed burning policies and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wetlands serve two increasingly critical functions in a climate-changed world, namely sequestering atmospheric carbon and moderating extremes in regional water cycles. These functions are particularly crucial in Australia, where climate change is likely to increase extreme weather events and impact water cycles. Yet despite multiscalar legal protections, Australia's total wetland cover is decreasing over time. We examine two contested wetland case studies and find that while legal mechanisms of protection exist in deliberative processes, good environmental outcomes are often undermined by the political mobility of competing commercial and industrial interests. Wetlands must be brought in from the periphery of social and political consciousness and placed at the heart of climate adaptation discourse and policy. Increasing the political mobility and agency of wetland protection has the capacity to simultaneously improve the environmental outcomes of deliberative processes and provide a legitimate pathway to greater regional climate resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deliberative democracy in the form of community participation is considered a 'key priority' in New South Wales (NSW) environmental planning. Community participation plays an increasingly central role in state significant developments, which are often sites of contestation. Community participation processes draw upon particular factors of place-based identity, which engage with notions of procedural legitimacy in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. This paper uses a legal geography analysis to explore this link between place-based identity and the experience of procedural legitimacy. We highlight a case study in which a contested coal mining development near Lithgow, NSW was approved by the NSW Planning Assessment Commission (PAC). This analysis examines how 'local' justice was constructed and mobilised in specific ways by proponents and opponents alike. Spatial factors of identity manifested in distinct ways in participation processes, particularly with respect to (i) claims to legitimacy and (ii) the lived experiences of engagement in a public forum. This case study demonstrates the way in which dualistic spatial terms such as 'outsider' opposition and 'local' support can render multiple interests of both human and non-human communities invisible. In so doing we are engaging with current work on environmental justice that examines the intersection of scale, efficacy and equity in processes of environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship of legal geography provides an alternative way of conceptualising human-environmental relationships. While laws determine access to and regulate use of land through practices of bounding and excluding, geographical studies provide insights into the way that both physical and social processes create places. The meeting of these perspectives is invaluable. Legal geography perspectives are coming of age in an era when transdisciplinary perspectives on human/nonhuman-landscape interactions are of core concern to wider land use policy considerations. This paper draws on legal geography scholarship about property framed around three key concepts (1) tenure security, (2) exclusion, and (3) rights to reveal the social complexity surrounding these issues. This complexity is magnified in non- Western settings, and in this paper, the legal geography perspective of analysis is extended to a developing country context. Using Cambodia as the primary setting, this paper challenges the unquestioning exportation of a dominant ' Western' property model into non- Western contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental regulation of biodiversity hotspots, including wetlands, is of increasing importance in an era when species and habitat loss is common. A number of global environmental protection regimes attempt to set up processes that protect vulnerable species and their habitats. One such regulatory regime, the Ramsar Convention (Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat), provides overarching protection for hundreds of wetlands around the world. In this paper, one Ramsar listed wetland, Southeast Asia's and Cambodia's largest freshwater lake, the Tonle Sap, is subject to a legal geographical analysis. A legal geography approach - one that puts front and centre an examination of both the environmental protection regulations for the wetlands and the people subject to them - enables the complexity of the legal-human-environment dynamic in this unique wetlands to be revealed. Measuring the success, or otherwise, of environmental protection regulations requires an understanding of both the biophysical and social dynamics of the place subject to that protection. Geographers, particularly legal geographers, are well placed to document the human-environment dimensions of place and to expose fragilities or disconnections between regulations and place. Regulations that do not take adequate account of complex people-place dynamics are likely to fall short of expectations and run the risk of becoming self-defeating, giving rise to a potential catch-22 scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]