After the earthquake, workers at the Flanders Marine Institute made sure that their online facility for monitoring sea levels around the globe was up-to-date and ready for an anticipated surge in visitors. "There was a crisis atmosphere here in the building," says Jan Mees, director of the institute, which works together with the Unesco office on many projects, including this one, known as the Sea Level Station Monitoring Facility.

"We heard about the earthquake through the media like everyone else, and then we started closely following the tsunami warning system from Hawaii," Mees says. "There was lots of interaction with the project office, ensuring that the data was coming in and that the system was stable."

The website, which usually receives about 40,000 hits a day, attracted 10 times that amount on 11 March and nearly three million hits the following day as people followed the tsunami news. (www.ioc-sealevelmonitoring.org)

The Sea Level Station Monitoring Facility was established in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004. Around the same time, Unesco was looking for an oce outside of its home base in Paris for its International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange programme (IODE). As it happened, the Flanders Marine Institute in Ostend had recently moved into a new, modern centre with plenty of space. And so in 2005 the Unesco project office moved in, and the Ostend base was opened.

The Flemish government allocates €600,000 a year to the office, whose activities also include training experts, cooperating with other international organisations and participating in EU projects such as SeaDataNet, a pan-European marine data management infrastructure.

Flanders' backing for Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) projects is not limited to the marine world. The region supports a wide range of cultural, educational and scientific endeavours, such as the use of photo novels to raise awareness about AIDS in southern Africa, a historical restoration project in Ilha de Mocambique and drawing up an inventory of oral traditions, rituals and traditional skills in African countries to help increase the recognition of their intangible cultural heritage.

In Unesco's Top 10
The partnership between Flanders and Unesco dates back to 1998 when they signed a cooperation agreement. A year later, the Flanders Unesco Science Trust Fund (FUST) was set up to finance scientific projects, and in 2001 the Flemish Unesco Trust Fund (FUT) for other policy areas followed.

The Flemish government contributes €1.4 million a year to FUST and €1 million every two years to FUT, making it among the 10 most important bilateral donors of Unesco in terms of Funds-in- Trust extra-budgetary contributions. "Unesco is one of the most relevant organisations for us," says Kristof Vandenberghe of the Flemish department of foreign affairs, because education and culture are policy areas of the country's communities, rather than federal competences. Science is a mixed competence and therefore also falls within the Flemish Region's powers.

Since the 1993 state reform in Belgium, which established, among other things, the in foro interno, in foro externo principle, regions have been able to pursue their own foreign policy in areas for which they are competent. It was this principle that allowed Flanders to sign the agreement with Unesco, one of the latter's rare international agreements with a sub-state entity.

"It was a unique opportunity to establish an international reputation, to put Flanders on the map," Vandenberghe says.

Some may question why Flanders is funding educational, scientific and cultural projects in far-flung corners of the world, while funding here for cultural projects, for instance, is facing cuts. "Some challenges that face us cannot be tackled at a Flemish level or even at a national level," explains Vandenberghe, citing as an example the collection of ocean data, which predicts weather patterns, El Niño, harvests in Africa and tsunamis. "It's our duty to provide expertise and financial means," he says. "For the good of all, the larger goal."

Maintaining urban integrity
The focus of FUT, the more general trust fund, was sharpened last year because the money was being spread too thinly, supporting too many projects in too many places. A 2009 assessment showed the fund's most important aspect to be heritage, including cultural, natural and intangible. So this has become FUT's new focus.

At the same time, the geographical focus was narrowed to countries in the Southern African Development Community, bringing it more in line with the areas in which Flanders does international development work.

One of the FUT's most recent undertakings is its involvement with Unesco's World Heritage Cities project, which aims to tackle the global challenge of how to reconcile modernisations and investments in historic cities. The project seeks to work out a methodology to preserve urban heritage, using African cities (such as Lamu in Kenya, Stonetown in Tanzania and Ilha de Moçambique in Mozambique) as test cases and come up with an instrument that can be applied internationally.

The project is of direct relevance to Flanders, not least because of the World Heritage status enjoyed by the historical centre of Bruges. As cities develop, civic leaders have to bear in mind how to maintain their historic character and identity or they risk losing their place on the Unesco World Heritage list, which happened to the German city of Dresden in 2009 after building a bridge over the Elbe that experts considered an intrusive element in the landscape.

Making history with Africa
Another new FUT initiative is its leading role in the World Heritage Marine Programme, which aims to preserve natural areas against exploitation and pollution. "Natural reserves are equally important, but underrepresented," says Vandenberghe.

Specific threats to marine heritage include coral bleaching, pollution and unsustainable tourism. Flanders focuses on the coastal areas of Southeast Africa, which reinforces the work done under the science trust fund, active in the same region. The marine focus also allows Unesco to use the experts from the Flanders Marine Institute and the IODE project office in Ostend.

One particular IODE project supported by the Flemish Region is the Ocean Data and Information Network for Africa, a project that only started in 2009 but has already produced real results. "For the first time in its history, Africa now has a system to establish tide gauges," explains Mees.

Before the network was established, there was a lack of tide data from the African continent, which meant a lack of reliable information about the Indian Ocean. "Now, Africa is an integral part of the tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean," he notes. "For a small amount of money, we have made a huge difference in parts of the world where few invest."

http://fust.iode.org

The new website www.unesco.flanders.be will be up and running in the coming week

Pictured (clockwise, from top): Ghent University partnered with Unesco for the project "The Frozen Graves of the Scythians", in which satellite images are used to pinpoint finds in one of the world's most valuable archaeological sites before global warming completely destroys the permafrost that has preserved the sites for more than 2,000 years; Flanders has prioritised the protection of marine biology and the monitoring of tides as part of its cooperation agreement with Unesco; Flanders supported the protection, digitisation and distribution of the Nelson Mandela documents as part of the Memory of the World programme