ATLANTA — A piece of Georgia will be up for a major worldwide heritage site designation.
The U.S. Department of the Interior filed a notice Friday with its intent to nominate the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site status.
The Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia is described in the filing as "one of the world's largest naturally driven freshwater ecosystems with a diversity of habitat types, including 21 vegetative types" with fauna "renowned worldwide for its diversity of amphibians and reptiles, mammals, birds, fishes, and invertebrates and perhaps as many as 1,000 species of moth."
"Unlike many other significant wetland areas, the swamp is the source of rivers rather than their recipient, as in a delta, and therefore is generally unaffected by most disturbances to natural hydrology and water flow," the filing additionally states. "The Refuge's undisturbed peat beds store valuable information on environmental conditions over the past 5,000 years and are a significant source of information related to global changes."
According to a release by Sen. Jon Ossoff, who has pushed for the designation, the refuge area also includes 74 Native American mounds.
The swamp has been fiercely contested in the recent past over a plan to mine near parts of its boundaries.
In a bipartisan effort, Democratic Sen. Ossoff and Republican Rep. Buddy Carter pushed for the UNESCO nomination.
“A UNESCO World Heritage Site designation for the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge would encourage environmental protection and economic prosperity for the region,” Sen. Ossoff said in a statement. “It would support efforts to protect and preserve the Refuge’s natural and cultural resources and further important scientific exploration and analysis. The nomination would also attract tourism and benefit the local and recreational economy and communities.”
According to the Department of the Interior's filing, the next step is a draft nomination which can be submitted for review by the National Park Service and then submission for World Heritage Centre review by Sept. 30. The Centre is to provide comment by Nov. 15, and then the Federal Interagency Panel for World Heritage reviews the draft nomination to recommend whether or not it should be formally submitted to the World Heritage Centre.
That final submission deadline is Feb. 1 every year.
"The World Heritage Committee would then consider the nomination at its annual meeting in the summer of the following year, after an evaluation by an official Advisory Body to the Committee," the filing states.
