Cultural Landscapes: Integrating Culture and Nature to Uplift Global Sustainability Through the Lenses of the UN SDGs 2030 Agenda

Abstract

Cultural landscapes form the shared commons of each community, while rural agriculture, woodlands and waterways bear the imprint of human uses as they support biocultural diversity. Our shared landscapes intertwine and entangle biological and cultural diversity, natural and human habitats, and tangible and intangible heritage. Cultural landscapes are vessels of heritage where livelihoods, spiritual meanings, traditions and practices express the values of landscapes and waterscapes. Human settlements of all sizes and types are vessels of biotic and cultural diversity. Varied twenty-first-century challenges urge us to embrace these interrelated aspects of diversity within cultural landscapes. Working toward the protection, future vitality of cultural landscapes is a deeply sustainable activity. With 75% of the terrestrial surface deeply altered by humanity, in both positive and negative ways, cultural landscapes offer an opportunity to help address the big issues of our times by engaging biodiversity, climate, justice, inclusion, resources, wealth and poverty. As we implement the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) 2030 Agenda with its 2020 to 2030 decade of global and local action and the parallel UN 2021–2030 Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, our actions, based in an understanding of entangled and inseparable Nature and Culture, offer a platform for effective cultural landscape undertakings.