- Description
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Following consideration by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee at its meeting in July 2024, The Flow Country in Caithness and Sutherland has been inscribed on the World Heritage List. The Site is considered the most outstanding example of an actively accumulating blanket bog landscape. This peatland ecosystem, which has been accumulating for the past 9,000 years, provides a diversity of habitats home to a distinct combination of bird species and displays a remarkable diversity of features not found anywhere else on Earth. Peatlands play an important role in storing carbon and the property’s ongoing peat-forming ecological processes continue to sequester carbon on a very large scale, representing a significant research and educational resource.
In 2023, when the Site was a ‘candidate’ WHS (nominated to UNESCO for consideration), The Highland Council prepared and published a Planning Position Statement and a tailored Heritage Impact Assessment Toolkit, aiming to provide protection to the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of the candidate Site and clear guidance to developers about the Site and about assessment and consideration of development proposals. Those documents reflected the nomination, in particular that the site was nominated under both criteria ix) and x) within the World Heritage Convention.
On 26 July 2024, the status of the Site changed from ‘candidate’ to ‘inscribed’, with its inclusion on the list of World Heritage being for criterion ix) only. These have necessitated corresponding updates to the Position Statement and to the Toolkit, with reference to documentation that is published on the UNESCO webpage for the Site, particularly the Statement of Outstanding Universal Value.
The opportunity has also been taken to further evolve and refine the content of the Planning Position Statement, for example, to reflect emerging practice and procedure. It remains useful to have such a position statement and tailored toolkit, to provide guidance on the still relatively new World Heritage consideration for the Site, particularly ahead of the updating of the Management Plan for the Site being completed and the new Highland Local Development Plan being prepared.
The tailored Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) toolkit has been produced to aid in assessing the impact of developments on the Flow Country World Heritage Site. If there is any doubt as to the potential for a development to impact the Site, an HIA screening should be carried out and, if appropriate, a full assessment provided. The tools included in the toolkit have been tailored from the guidance and toolkit for Impact Assessments in a World Heritage Context Resource Manual (2022) produced by UNESCO and its advising agencies.
Read the position statements and assessment toolkit
Management Plan
The Highland Council (for, and on behalf of, The Flow Country Partnership) has determined in accordance with Section 8 (1) of The Environmental Assessment (Scotland) Act 2005 that a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) will be required for the Management Plan for The Flow Country World Heritage Site, as indicated in this determination notice. More information about the Management Plan and the associated SEA will be published in 2026.
