Roughly 25 years after South Africa pegged out the boundaries of its first World Heritage Site around Lake St Lucia, neighbouring Mozambique has put forward plans to protect part of its adjoining coastal territory to form a significantly enlarged global heritage zone.

Roughly 25 years after South Africa pegged out the boundaries of its first World Heritage Site around Lake St Lucia, neighbouring Mozambique has put forward plans to protect part of its adjoining coastal territory to form a significantly enlarged global heritage zone.

The proposal to join up the marine and coastal landscapes of the iSimangaliso Wetlands Park and the Maputo National Park into a single heritage area will be considered in Paris next month at a meeting of the World Heritage Committee.

The committee is part of a United Nations convention to safeguard places considered to have "outstanding universal value".

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In a draft decision put forward for approval at the 6-16 July meeting, the committee describes this area as both "scenically beautiful" and "one of the most outstanding natural wetland and coastal sites of Africa".

But there is also a dark cloud hovering above this idyllic horizon - a proposal to build a new deep-water coal export harbour and 30,000-hectare industrial zone, pretty much in the middle of the new heritage zone.

If it goes ahead, the plan involves building a new or upgraded 1,100km railway link from Botswana, passing through Zimbabwe and then connecting to a proposed deep-water harbour...