2025 World Monument Watch

Nominate a site to the 2025 Watch

Submissions will be accepted until Friday, March 15, 2024, at 5pm EDT. Guidelines for nominations are available in 8 languages.

What is the World Monuments Watch?

The World Monuments Watch is a nomination-based program that connects local heritage preservation to global awareness and action. Every two years, the Watch rallies support to places in need and the people who care for them, spotlighting new challenges and the communities worldwide harnessing heritage to confront the crucial issues of our time. At its core, the Watch’s call to action seeks to empower timely preservation efforts that improve the lives of communities. The 2025 Watch will include 25 places, each telling an urgent local story with global relevance. Through this initiative, World Monuments Fund (WMF) partners with the people who know these places best, amplifying their efforts through advocacy, capacity building, and close collaboration with WMF’s expert team and professionals across the globe.

Preserving heritage is a collective effort. The Watch invites you to nominate a site.

The 2025 Watch

The 2025 World Monuments Watch invites nominations for heritage places facing urgent challenges and where preservation can bring transformative change and creative solutions.

Heritage places hold great meaning for individuals and communities around the globe. They are sources of inspiration, memory, and identity, as well as places where people live, work, worship, play, and create. Yet in our dynamic and rapidly changing world, these places can face numerous threats. Experienced locally, such threats often resonate with pressures to heritage across our planet—from unsustainable tourism and unchecked urbanization to natural disasters and climate change. At the same time, heritage holds huge potential to address contemporary societal needs. It can enhance resilience, drive sustainable development, and foster mutual understanding across peoples and cultures. In a world grappling with many shared challenges—from environmental degradation to persistent inequalities to human conflict to forced migration, among others—the ingenuity of local solutions can resonate far beyond the bounds of a single community.

Recognizing the breadth of challenges affecting places and people around the world, the Watch seeks nominations that highlight how heritage preservation can respond today and help build a stronger future.

The Watch seeks nominations that rank highly according to these criteria:

  • Cultural significance: How deeply does the nominated place embody, reflect, or relate to the culture or history of a community, country, or region? Can its preservation inspire an appreciation for the richness and diversity of our shared past?
  •  Relevance to urgent issues: Does the nomination respond to imminent threats or time-sensitive opportunities? Does the nomination have unmistakable ties to salient socio-cultural or environmental issues with global resonance?
  • Potential for community benefit: How can preserving the nominated site meaningfully benefit communities? Does the nomination show the potential to enhance or enrich the social, cultural, economic, or environmental life of communities or otherwise yield benefits through the preservation process?
  • Feasibility: Can World Monuments Fund effectively support the nomination with the resources and expertise that we can offer? Are there foreseeable challenges that could impede an impactful collaboration?

The most competitive nominations for the 2025 Watch will demonstrate a place’s deep importance to the past and present lives of communities and inspire action through relevance to the most pressing issues of our time.

Want to nominate a site? Check out the program descriptions and guidelines.