Lunar protection is one giant leap for World Monuments Fund

The World Monuments Fund has released its biennial list of ­endangered heritage sites, and it includes a place only 12 people have set foot on … the moon.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant an American flag on the surface of the moon on of July 21, 1969.

Be it from war, climate change or tourism, across the world our cultural heritage is in peril. But these threats are no longer limited to this planet.

The World Monuments Fund has released its biennial list of ­endangered heritage sites. Alongside the shattered urban landscape in Gaza, storm-lashed lighthouses in New England and fragile Buddhist grottoes carved into cliffs in China, the organisation has listed a place that only 12 people have set foot on: the moon.

Earth’s nearest neighbour, it says, is home to about 90 important historic sites where hundreds of artefacts lie strewn across its surface, undisturbed since the American and Soviet moon missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the new era of space flight led by private companies, there is concern that the remnants of these landings could be erased.

“It’s the first time that we have received an outer-space nomination, and for us it was a surprise too,” Benedicte de Montlaur, chief executive of the WMF, said.

“There is definitely momentum and it is indeed very timely because we are entering a new age of space exploration.”

The moon was nominated to become one of the 25 at-risk places on the World Monuments Watch by the International Council on Monuments and Sites. The areas it would seek to protect include Tranquility Base, the site of the first moon landing in 1969, which still has Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s footprints in the dust. There are also sites where early probes were deliberately crashed into the surface; detritus left by astronauts, such as moon buggies; and experiments set up by NASA.

However, the moon is essentially ungoverned – jurisdiction is yet to make it past the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA has published guidelines, but they remain no more than that.

The WMF feels the time has come to act. Its worry is not about vandalism so much as unintentional interference by the state-backed and private operators training their sights on the moon. “The goal of this nomination is to call for an international framework of co-operation to accompany this new space age,” Ms De Montlaur said.

“You have some precedents and the main, most interesting one is Antarctica, where monuments were nominated like Shackleton’s hut (that the explorer built in 1908). You have a treaty in Antarctica recognising heritage and protecting it.”

The WMF also has more earthly worries. The Assembly Rooms in Belfast, built in 1769 and now derelict, have been on Northern Ireland’s Heritage at Risk ­register for two decades, but attention has gone global.

“We have seen some places of difficult heritage with tough memories that people and communities put forward as they think it’s important to remember,” Ms De Montlaur said.

The historical buildings of Gaza, including mosques, churches and markets, are on the watchlist. The stress is on the need for a recovery effort. Ukraine is represented by the Kyiv Teacher’s House, the former legislature of an independent Ukraine that was devastated by a missile in 2022.

Others on the list include the city of Antakya in Turkey which was severely damaged by an earthquake in 2023.

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