MONDIACULT 2025
September 29th to October 1st, 2025
Barcelona, Spain
World Sensorium Conservancy is a partner in UNESCO’s MONDIACULT 2025—the World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development—brings together global leaders, policymakers, scholars, and cultural practitioners to define the future of culture in an era of rapid planetary change. Convened only once every several decades, MONDIACULT provides an unprecedented platform to reassess the role of culture in human development, peacebuilding, and sustainability. The 2025 conference in Barcelona continues this legacy, emphasizing how cultural heritage, creativity, and knowledge systems must be recognized as essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and addressing the pressing challenges of biodiversity loss, climate change, and social resilience.
At its core, MONDIACULT affirms that culture is not peripheral, but central to the world’s ability to imagine and enact equitable futures. It calls on nations and civil society to safeguard both tangible and intangible cultural heritage while embracing innovative frameworks for cultural rights, diversity, and ecological stewardship.
World Sensorium/Conservancy at MONDIACULT 2025
As part of its official participation, the World Sensorium Conservancy (WS/C) is honored to present the paper:
Aromatic Heritage—Safeguarding the Scents of Culture, Memory, and Biodiversity
This position paper highlights the urgent need to recognize and protect the world’s aromatic heritage—an often overlooked yet profoundly essential dimension of cultural and ecological diversity. It demonstrates how aromatic plants and the olfactory traditions they sustain are critical to cultural identity, memory, and healing, while also playing a vital role in biodiversity and climate resilience.
Drawing on decades of interdisciplinary research and conservation work, WS/C outlines best practices and policy recommendations to ensure that aromatic and medicinal plants—together with the knowledge systems they carry—are preserved for future generations. The paper calls for a paradigm shift in cultural policy: one that fully integrates sensory knowledge, scent traditions, and plant conservation into global strategies for resilience and well-being.
In presenting this work, WS/C invites cultural leaders, scientists, and policymakers to join in safeguarding the scents of culture as living archives of memory and biodiversity. Our shared aromatic heritage, if protected, can guide us toward more sustainable, interconnected futures.