From June 22 to 30 in Seville, Spain, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee will review a list of hundreds of candidate sites proposed by countries around the world as part of the World Heritage Site selection process. In the end, only 20 or so sites will make the cut and be named World Heritage Sites, putting them firmly on global tourism's radar.

Each country submitting candidate sites must maintain a 'tentative' list of sites from which it can submit two candidates to the selection committee. This year, China's tentative list features 52 different sites, including three in Yunnan. China currently has 37 World Heritage Sites.

The Yunnan sites on China's tentative list include Dali Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake Scenic Spot, the Hani Terraces of Yuanyang and the lesser-known Chengjiang fossil lagerstätte at Maotian Mountain. While Dali, Yuanyang and Chengjiang are by no means unknown to travelers, being selected a World Heritage Site would bring new tourist revenue – and new developmental issues.

Yunnan is currently home to three World Heritage Sites: Old Town of Lijiang, Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas and South China Karst. Here's a quick look at the sites that could be selected in June:

Dali
Set between the towering Cangshan Mountains and the expansive waters of Erhai Lake, Dali has been a mainstay on the China backpacker circuit for more than a decade.

The agricultural know-how of the ethnic Bai people native to the area made Dali an important rice production base in dynastic times. This wealth fuelled the rise of the Nanzhao Kingdom, which was centered in Dali and at its height stretched from northern Laos, Thailand and Myanmar up into Chengdu and the Sichuan Basin before incurring the wrath of the Tang Dynasty.

Today Dali's old town is the most popular destination for travelers, but small guesthouses have also been popping up around Erhai Lake at Xizhou and Shuanglang. At the end of this year a new train line will link Dali and Lijiang.

Should Dali become a World Heritage Site, it would likely face many of the same development-versus-preservation problems that Lijiang has dealt with.

Yuanyang
Yuanyang and its rice terraces have long been an 'off the beaten track' option for travelers to Yunnan wishing for something different from the Dali-Lijiang-Tiger Leaping Gorge route. With just a fraction of Dali's tourism, Yuanyang offers a much more "local" experience for travelers – there is very little tourism infrastructure, roads around the terraces are often quite rough, and dining options are rather limited.

In terms of scenery, the more than 13,000 hectares of rice terraces around Yuanyang offer some of the most stunning natural images to be found in China, especially at the beginning of the year when the terraces are filled with water creating a striking mirror effect.

For relatively poor Yuanyang, World Heritage Site status would be tantamount to winning the lottery. The main question would be how much of the incoming tourist revenue would make its way into the pockets of locals.

Chengjiang fossil lagerstätte
The least-known of the three Yunnan sites on the tentative list, Chengjiang's Lagerstätte – a sedimentary deposit rich in fossils – is centered around Maotian Shan, located just north of the city of Chengjiang and picturesque Fuxian Lake, one of China's deepest and cleanest lakes.

While it is ignored by travel guidebooks, Chengjiang and its Lagerstätte is quite famous among paleontologists for the fossilized sea life it contains, collectively referred to as 'Chengjiang Fauna'. Chengjiang Fauna is considered one of the 'Three faunas of the evolution of early life forms' along with Burgess Shale Fauna in western Canada and the Ediacaran Fauna of South Australia.

The Chengjiang Lagerstätte recently made news around the world when Yunnan and UK scientists announced that they had found the earliest example of collective behavior there in the form of 525 million-year-old crustacean fossils linked together.

Already a popular weekend getaway for wealthy Kunmingers, Chengjiang would likely experience a rapid increase in international travelers as well as Chinese from other parts of the country were it to be named a heritage site.

Chengjiang fossil image: Nature.com

China's nascent national park program has taken another step toward increasing the coverage of the country's most important natural sites with the announcement of a new planned national park in Yunnan.

The Lijiang Municipal Government announced that it will invest 500 million yuan (US$73.1 million) with Yunnan Tourism Group (云南旅游产业集团) to build China's next national park in Lijiang's Laojunshan area, which is expected to open to the public in three years.

Still officially pending government approval, Laojunshan National Park (老君山国家公园) would be China's – and northwest Yunnan's – second national park. China's first national park, Pudacuo National Park (普达措国家公园), opened in 2007. In an odd twist of bureaucracy, Pudacuo has only been officially recognized by the Yunnan provincial government as a national park and is still waiting for official recognition by Beijing.

The proposed national park at Laojunshan is projected to cover an area of 1,085 square kilometers (419 square miles). Located 60km from the city of Lijiang, it will serve as a showcase of the biological and cultural diversity at the heart of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in northwest Yunnan which contains the headwaters of the Yangtze, Mekong and Salween Rivers.

Laojunshan is home to 168 endangered plant and animal species including the Yunnan Golden Monkey. It also boasts 10 percent of the world's rhododendron species. The area is dotted by dozens of alpine lakes, the most famous being Dragon Pool (龙潭).

US-based NGO The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has worked with local governments on both the Pudacuo and Laojunshan park projects. Dr Zhou Dequn, manager of the Laojunshan project at TNC, told GoKunming that Pudacuo offers many lessons for Laojunshan.

Citing the pending approval by the central government for Pudacuo, Dr Zhou said that China would benefit from a legislative framework that provides for a more streamlined approval process for parks. The experiences of Pudacuo have also shown the importance of a master plan incorporating fundamental survey work focused on natural and social data collection, he added.

"As there are no national regulations for national parks, we have to assist local governments to set up regulations with a bottom-up approach – namely the local congress formulates national park regulations first and submits to the provincial congress for final approval," Zhou said.

"It is very time-consuming and difficult to reach an agreement among the different stakeholders before final approval, as the national park is almost a brand-new conservation model for mainland China."

Zhou said that in addition to legislative issues, optimizing the impact of national parks on local communities was also a major challenge for China's national park program.

It will be difficult to achieve "real win-win results for conservation and local community development," he said, adding that to do so would require balancing conservation with local community development, figuring out what role local communities can play in national park management and ensuring that local communities benefit from the development of national parks in China.

Image: softime.cn

The 'South China Karst' area, which includes Yunnan's Stone Forest (石林, shilin) and Karst formations in Guizhou, Chongqing and Guangxi was selected by the World Heritage Committee on Tuesday to be inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

South China Karst will join Madagascar's Rainforests of the Atsinanana and South Korea's Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes as the newest members of the list, which represent UNESCO's aim to "encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity."

UNESCO's decision to include South China Karst on the World Heritage List marks the third time that a site in Yunnan has been added to the list. Previously, Old Town of Lijiang and Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas were added to the list in 1997 and 2003, respectively.

Inscription on the list will likely boost domestic and international tourist visits to Stone Forest, but it is doubtful that Shilin will receive the significant influx of tourists that Lijiang has experienced since 1997. Protecting the area could lead to more discoveries - or rediscoveries - of rare flora and fauna such as the reappearance last year of Paraisometrum mileense aka mile jutai (弥勒苣苔), a yellow-flowered plant that only grows on Karst limestone formations and was last seen in 1906.

Looking at the other Yunnan inscribees on the list, The Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas have benefited from efforts by environmental NGO The Nature Conservancy in conjunction with the Chinese government to minimize the impact of development and increased tourism in the area. The Chinese government has placed enough importance upon the areas to name a 2,000-square kilometer portion known as Pudacao as China's first national park two days ago. The area's spectacular mountainous terrain is brimming with tourism potential and is expected to see major growth in tourist visits as nearby Lijiang is built into a regional air hub connecting secondary cities in Yunnan with Chinese and Southeast Asian cities.

Lijiang was visited by more than four million tourists last year, with more than one million of them coming from Beijing. Not surprisingly, daily direct charter flights connecting Beijing and Lijiang were launched on Monday.

Image: Virtual Tourist