The Asia-Pacific region is replete with heritage sites worth preserving. These places help us understand our past, enrich our present lives and lay the foundation for future generations. The inhabitants continue to practice their indigenous beliefs, social practices and rituals and to use traditional management regimes to sustain the monuments and surrounding landscape that have nurtured them for generations.

However, these heritage sites are under threat from the passage of time, the forces of nature, modernization, uncontrolled development and population growth. They have also become powerful magnets for tourists who are in search of a rich cultural experience far removed from their own lives. This publication focuses on the impact of tourism on the rice terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, an outstanding model of sustainable use of limited land resources using traditional knowledge-based technology that has evolved over the last two millennia. Full document in PDF (5.45MB); Number of pages: 100p; UNESCO, Bangkok;