Fanny Douvere

Dr Fanny Douvere
Coordinator
Marine Programme
World Heritage Centre
UNESCO
Paris, France

Dr. Fanny Douvere is the coordinator of the Marine Programme at UNESCO's World Heritage Centre in Paris, France. Since October 2009, her mission is to ensure the 49 marine sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List are conserved and sustainably managed so future generations can continue to enjoy them. She recently wrote in Nature why not investing in marine World Heritage is a lost opportunity for the oceans.

Under her leadership, marine World Heritage transformed into a global network of flagship marine protected areas managers spanning 37 countries and stretching from the tropics to the poles. Marine areas protected under the World Heritage Convention have more then doubled since she took office. Her day-to-day work includes field missions to evaluate the state of conservation on a wide range of topics, including the criticaly endangered Vaquita in Mexico's Gulf of California, the Rampal power plant in the Sundarbans, Bangladesh and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. 

Most recently, she led UNESCO's first global scientific assessment on the impacts of climate change on World Heritage coral reefs and the World Heritage Centre's first analysis on the use of the 1972 World Heritage Convention to establish and conserve marine protected areas in the High Seas. Suggested marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction that might be of possible Outstanding Universal Value and could thus merit World Heritage protection include the Costa Rica Dome, the Sargasso Sea, the Atlantis Bank, the Lost City Hydrothermal Field and the White Shark Café. More information is available in the UNESCO publication World Heritage in the High Seas: an Idea Whose Time Has Come.

Prior to her work at the World Heritage Centre, she co-initiated the Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) initative at UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. In 2009, she co-published the UNESCO guide Marine Spatial Planning: A step-by-step Approach toward ecosystem-based management. The guide has gained international recognition for setting a standard for the application of MSP and is available in six languages. She also served as an advisor to the United States Executive Office of the President (Council of Environmental Quality) on the development of the US Framework for Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning as well as the European Union during that time.

She (co-) authored more than 20 articles in internationally peer-reviewed journals on both marine World Heritage and MSP. Most recently, she authored World Heritage Marine Sites. Managing effectively the world's most iconic Marine Protected Areas in which she lays out a tangible approach for marine protected area management based on the fundamental idea that all things happen in time and space and the oceans should be managed accordingly. She regularly shares her experiences and insights gained through her work on her National Geographic blog.

She obtained her PhD degree in 2010 from the Ghent University in Belgium and published the book Marine Spatial Planning: Concepts, current practice and linkages to other management approaches.

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