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

After years of sometimes confused policy in which industrial hemp was lumped together with its psychoactive cousin marijuana, the Chinese government is now actively promoting hemp cultivation as a tool for lifting rural Chinese out of poverty.

China will build multiple hemp cultivation bases in Yunnan, Heilongjiang, Gansu and Anhui provinces as well as the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia by 2020, a project that is expected to bring three million people out of poverty, according to a Shanghai Daily report citing an official from the People's Liberation Army's General Logistics Department.

Production at one of the first facilities involved in this plan went online yesterday in Menghai County in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in southern Yunnan. The hemp fiber processing factory, owned by China Hemp Industrial Holding Co Ltd, has an annual capacity of 2,000 tonnes.

In addition to being used to produce fibers for rope and clothing, hemp can also be used to make paper which is much less damaging to the environment than paper made from trees. Aside from causing deforestation, tree paper is bleached with toxic chlorine bleach. Hemp paper can be bleached with less environmentally harmful hydrogen peroxide.

Industrial hemp can also be used to produce fuel, biodegradable plastics, construction materials and health foods.

The government in Xishuangbanna now provides farmers with free hemp seeds plus technical training. According to the prefecture's party chief Jiang Pusheng, there are nearly 10,000 farmers growing hemp in the area, farmers who through hemp cultivation stand to double their annual income from 2,000 yuan (US$293) to 4,000 yuan.

Image: Baidu

It is high season for moving in Kunming right now, with many people moving into the city for the first time and many others moving out of the city or upgrading their living situation from the previous year. One of the main discoveries one makes when moving house is how much stuff one accumulates over time – especially clothes.

Throwing away unwanted clothing that is still wearable is wasteful anywhere in the world, but especially in Yunnan, which despite having increasingly wealthy urban centers still has millions of rural poor who could use new clothing.

Since last December, The Hump Group – which runs the Hump Bar in Jinma Biji Fang – has been accepting unwanted clothing for distribution to Yunnan's rural poor, especially in the Nujiang area, near the border with Myanmar. The first delivery of clothing – more than 7,000 items – made it to the Nujiang area just weeks before one of China's worst winters in decades.

Since then, General Manager of the Hump Group Sun Haibo has been working to expand the donated clothing network's reach throughout Yunnan via a donor network of restaurants and guesthouses around the province. Donations now come from as far away as Zhejiang and Beijing.

On the village end of things, the Christian Association of Yunnan was one of the organizations that has been crucial to the program's success – with their numerous churches, they had a ready network that could identify villages in need and help deliver the clothes.

So far over 15 tons of clothes have been delivered to villages all over Nujiang, as well as other places like Zhaotong in northeast Yunnan and even a few villages in neighboring Guizhou province. It has become fairly common for a mysterious package of clothes to show up at the Hump Bar, or some of the clientele to drop a few pieces of unwanted clothes off.

In exchange for their generosity, donors get a sticker showing two clasping hands and the words 'I helped' in Chinese and English. The motto for the campaign is: 'We don't want your money. We just want your clothes.'

If you want to contribute, all clothing must be clean and wearable – any kind of clothing for any season is welcome. Donations can be dropped off at The Hump Bar, call 3646229 for more information.

Yunnan will be one of five administrative regions in China to participate in the project "Green Poverty Reduction in China" with the goal of environmentally-friendly economic and energy development, which was launched at the end of November.

The US$8.5 billion project is an initiative between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), China's Ministry of Science and Technology and a branch of the Ministry of Commerce. Aimed at alleviating western China's poverty with green business and energy generation, the initiative will provide small-scale wind turbines to Inner Mongolian herdsmen and fund production of Chinese medicinal herb Jarrah Dayun in Xinjiang.

The initiative will also target the arid mountainous regions of northeast Yunnan, southeast Sichuan and northwest Guizhou, where it will fund planting of Jatropha curcas L., a tree that thrives in arid regions, adds nutrients to soil and produces large amounts of an oil that can be used in making bio-diesel.

The goal of the project in the region is to expand the existing 27,000 hectares of jatropha trees to more than 270,000 hectares within the next five years, which is expected to add US$65-$90 of income per year to the areas impoverished farmers. The initiative will also explore local strategies for optimizing jatropha's energy potential.