Pakistan's Heritage Digital Ecosystem · Umbrella hub
Policy, law and intelligence for Pakistan's heritage
The operational centre of the ecosystem: national heritage policy, legal and regulatory compliance, Heritage Impact Assessment, climate and disaster resilience, public advocacy — and the Heritage Intelligence engine that grounds all of it in evidence.
One ecosystem, four instruments
Each domain carries one duty, and every record is joined by a single key — the Atlas Site ID. Any site can be resolved on any domain at /site/{id}.
Policy, advocacy, law, HIA, climate resilience and the Intelligence engine. The command centre.
UNESCO World Heritage in all four categories: cultural, natural, mixed and intangible. Committee monitoring, SOC tracking, Taxila and Rohtas Watch.
The 6,200-record national inventory: GIS map, filters, per-site records — growing into a curated touristic guide with heritage trails.
Time-series photographic archive: condition monitoring, then-and-now comparisons, verified field submissions tagged to Site IDs.
The five pillars of this hub
Evidence-grounded research over 6,921 indexed items — the national registry, 122 UNESCO Committee decisions and 20 statutes. Cites its sources; abstains when the record cannot answer.
The Legislative Matrix: auditing the Antiquities Act 1975 and provincial statutes, monitoring gazette notifications and enforcement practice.
Project-level HIA for infrastructure interventions and spatial screening of urbanisation and zoning pressure on catalogued sites.
Flood vulnerability, water-table threat, extreme heat and emergency mitigation planning for heritage places — the resilience framework of the ecosystem.
Policy briefs, the Ground Truth census, Taxila and Rohtas Watch campaigns, expert analysis and research publications.
Site-linked expert and public discussion — evidence over opinion, with moderation, labelling and appeals. The consultations below open first.
The editorial pillars currently publish on pwhi.digital and are being consolidated under this hub; existing addresses will redirect when the move completes.
The national protection gap — the evidence this hub acts on
Beyond the inscribed and tentative properties, PWHI maintains a structured inventory of roughly 6,200 catalogued heritage places. (PWHI analysis on PWHI data, verified against the master registry, July 2026.)
Catalogued places
With legal protection
Not protected (~89.0%)
Protection attributed to the Antiquities Act 1975 (390), the Punjab Special Premises (Preservation) Ordinance 1985 (226), the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Antiquities Act 2016 (25), the AJK antiquities law (24), the Sindh Cultural Heritage (Preservation) Act 1994 (8), the Punjab Heritage Foundation Act 2005 (6), Karachi Building & Town Planning Regulations (2), the Quaid-i-Azam’s Mazar Ordinance (1) and 2 recorded only as “protected”. Protection status is treated as unverified for any site unless an identifiable statute or gazette notification is confirmed.
The first consultations that will open
Policy — province counts and protection gaps in planning and budgets.
Law & protection — what enforcement actually looks like locally.
Local government — capacity in the districts that hold the most sites.
Media & advocacy — citizen documentation of threat, done responsibly.
UNESCO & beyond — six properties on the List; thousands beyond it.
Governance — independent monitoring and open data without a parallel bureaucracy.
How contributions will be handled
Contribution → community rules → moderation → labelled as opinion / evidence / PWHI position → published or referred
Moderation comes first: nothing is published without review, and unverified material is never presented as established fact.
Ask Heritage Intelligence Explore the Atlas World Heritage portal