For Proposed Panel: The Legacy of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Middle East and North Africa. The proposed paper examines how farmers and food sovereignty activists in Lahore are saving their intangible heritage in the face of the tangible public-private redevelopment proposed along the Ravi River. It outlines four tendencies that are shifting geo-political and economic priorities while challenging the principles embedded in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage discourse: 1) demands of reconciliation through reparation; 2) recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic of the correlation between climate change and “social inequality”; 3) movements across the globe calling for public oversight of governance; 4) rethinking of our (human) relationship with land, territories, sites, and cultural resources from the “custodianship” lens of indigenous people. Embodying the transdisciplinary lenses of decolonization, secularism, nationalism, this paper posits that developing baseline values is becoming more important than preserving “cultural heritage” as a resource. UNESCO needs to redefine the role of cultural heritage conservation in addressing socioecological problems and include community food sovereignty as shared heritage value.