September 21, 2012
Beijing time at 3 a.m. on September 21, it is reported from the 11th European Geopark conference held in the Portuguese Aloka Global Geopark that Sanqingshan UNESCO Global Geopark of China passed the review by the UNESCO Global geopark Executive Board to be formally included in the UNESCO Global Geoparks Network directory, and got the title of "Sanqingshan UNESCO Global Geopark". This was another world class brand after Sanqingshan successfully declared the "world natural heritage" in 2008.
Liu Shuzong, Secretary of the Party Working Committee of Sanqingshan Scenic Area, who traveled to Portugal to attend the meeting, introduced via a phone call that a total of 11 sites around the world had applied for UNESCO Global Geopark status, of which 7 were approved by vote at the conference. Sanqingshan was the only scenic spot in China that applied and successfully obtained the title of "UNESCO Global Geopark" in 2012.
The East China region where Sanqingshan UGGp is located already hosts numerous UNESCO Global Geoparks, including Huangshan UGGp, Lushan UGGp, Longhushan UGGp, Tianzhushan UGGp, and Ningde UGGp. In accordance with the relevant regulations for UNESCO Global Geopark application, no new geopark will be approved within 100 kilometers of an existing UNESCO Global Geopark. Furthermore, applications for sites within 200 kilometers will only be eligible for half the total score during the evaluation process.
Faced with difficulties and challenges, Sanqingshan UGGp has successively cooperated with authoritative domestic universities such as Peking University and China University of Geosciences. It has compiled a number of research achievements including International Comparative Study on Granite Geology and Geomorphology of Sanqingshan, collecting more than 6,000 photographs and nearly 1.2 million words of technical materials, providing strong scientific and technological support for the application work.
In recent years, domestic and foreign experts who have been invited to conduct on-site investigations at Sanqingshan UGGp believe that Sanqingshan records 880 million years of Earth's evolutionary history. It possesses extremely rare geological landscape value and unparalleled natural beauty, serving as a natural museum of granite micro-landforms of global significance, and thus has excellent conditions for its application to become a UNESCO Global Geopark.
