Many golden monkeys live in the dense forest at Shennongjia Natural Reserve. [File photo]

In the World Heritage Committee’s meeting that just ended, China’s chieftain heritage sites, mainly concentrated in the mountainous areas of Hunan, Hubei and Guizhou provinces in southeast China, were named as the country’s 48th World Heritage listing. This keeps China as the country with the second largest number of World Heritage sites, after Italy.

According to UNESCO’s latest data, there are a total 1,031 World Heritage sites, including 802 Cultural Heritage, 197 Natural Heritage and 32 Dual Inheritance listings. This year, 24 new sites were just inscribed on the list. Three World Heritage sites were added to the List of World Heritage in Danger.

The committee also launched the global Unite for Heritage Coalition, designed to strengthen mobilization in the face of deliberate damage to cultural heritage, particularly in the Middle East. It also adopted the Bonn Declaration, which recommends that heritage protection be included in the mandate of peacekeeping missions when appropriate.