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The World Heritage Convention (The Convention concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage) was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on 16 November 1972. Australia was one of the early signatories to the Convention, signing in 1974.
Under the World Heritage Convention, qualification for World Heritage listing of a natural heritage property was based on four criteria at the time of listing of Gondwana Rainforests of Australia (then named Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves of Australia). (The criteria have been rearranged since that time.) The four original criteria were:
i. outstanding examples representing the major stages of the earth's evolutionary history.
ii. outstanding examples representing significant ongoing geological processes, biological evolution and man's interaction with his natural environment.
iii. contain superlative natural phenomena, formations or features.
iv. contain the most important and significant habitats where threatened species of plants and animals of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science and conservation still survive. |
The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia site qualified on three of the four criteria (Criterion i, ii and iv).
World Heritage values of Springbrook
Springbrook National Park is part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area. Essentially all the World Heritage values described for the Area can be found at Springbrook. It represents the wet heartland of the entire World Heritage Area, and most closely resembles the palaeoclimatic conditions existing more than 25 million years ago when the ancestry of today’s flora and fauna evolved.
The survival of these ancient lineages is critically dependent on stable refuges that preserve to the greatest extent those ancestral climates that were much wetter and more equable than now. Soils were also much more nutrient rich than the leached, impoverished ones dominating most of Australia today.
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