Climate change poses a major challenge for heritage owners and managers, and has the potential for high-impact and irreversible damage in the absence of remedial action. Natural areas continue to be affected by invasive species, loss of habitat and altered fire regimes.

Economic growth creates pressures for redevelopment and resources extraction, which can cause major impact on natural and cultural heritage at the landscape scale and for individual heritage places.

Population changes give rise to increasing density and redevelopment pressures for heritage places and conservation precincts in urban areas, whereas heritage places in rural areas remain under threat from redundancy, leading to neglect and decay.

Tourism offers both opportunities and challenges for Australia’s heritage. Sustainable tourism can provide important resources and raise awareness, but poorly managed tourism can damage heritage values.

Protection for Australia’s heritage places relies on land reservation, statutory heritage inventories and sound management, but also reactive heritage impact assessment processes. Our protected natural and cultural resources do not yet comprise an appropriate set of heritage places.

Australia’s heritage registers list natural and cultural places at national, state and local levels, but in an inconsistent manner and with disparate levels of resourcing and regulation. However, there has been progress towards more integrated, tiered systems of heritage management.

There is a nationally coordinated strategic approach to inclusion of representative lands within the National Reserve System and the National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas, and an increasing trend towards strategic review of historic heritage registers and schedules.

Although the Australian Heritage Strategy proposes a consistent approach to the recognition, protection and management of Indigenous heritage sites, no mechanism is in place to establish a national approach and standards for assessment and protection of Indigenous heritage.

Progress has been made in determining the nature, purpose and scope of the National Heritage List. Substantial additional resources will be required to allow the National Heritage List to include and protect the places that reflect our identity as a nation, and tell our story.

Heritage is a public ‘good’ that contributes to local communities and the economy, and therefore warrants a collaborative approach. Governments at all levels contribute through identifying, protecting and regulating heritage, by managing many significant heritage places, and by allocating resources, offering incentives and providing access to information. Corporate and private owners of heritage places contribute directly to their conservation and management, and warrant encouragement and support. Community organisations also make valuable contributions.

The role of Indigenous people in managing Indigenous heritage continues to expand, as does recognition of the importance of intangible Indigenous heritage, despite a nationally fragmented jurisdictional approach to Indigenous heritage. Landscape-based approaches to assessing and managing Indigenous heritage are more prevalent.

More flexible approaches are required to enable good heritage and community outcomes in the face of continuing pressures. Recognition of the embodied energy and cultural inheritance values of historic buildings, proactive land-use planning to reserve and conserve areas of Indigenous heritage value, and growing use of ‘offsite’ technology for delivery of information are examples of contemporary responses to the challenge of managing heritage places.

The Australian Heritage Strategy commits to effective communication and fostering best practice, through partnership with professional and community groups, such as the Australian Executive Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, the Australian Committee for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the National Trusts of Australia.