During the period, from December 8 to December 15, Zhang Rouran (the lecturer of School of Tourism and Service Management) participated in the "19th International Council on Monuments and Sites" held in Delhi, India, and there were roughly 900 representatives from across the world registered as participants.
Established at Warsaw, Poland in 1965, International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) is a professional advisory institution of World Heritage Committee. Consisting of cultural heritage professionals from across the world, ICOMOS is the only international non-governmental organization in the field of monuments and sites protection and repair. Up to 2017, ICOMOS has gathered 10,100 individual members, 320 group members, 110 national committees and 28 international science committees from 153 countries, and its disciplinary background covers such fields as building, history, archaeology, art history, geography, anthropology, engineering and urban planning. ICOMOS plays an important role in the examination and approval of the declaration list of world cultural heritages nominated by various countries in the world .
ICOMOS convention is convenes every three years, and for this convention held in India, one of its important themes is to explore the methods for the protection, declaration and management of cultural and natural heritages of overlapping value. As Chinese representative, Mr. Zhang Rouran was selected into the group in charge of the compilation of Statement on Natural -- Cultural Journey (Yatra Statement, hereinafter abbreviated as Statement), an international document related to the theme just mentioned. The Statement lays a keynote characterized by the integration of nature and culture and proposes a protection concept based on 14 themes, it calls for various countries to consider the landscape integrality of the heritages, encourages them to inherit traditional technologies and actively use new ones to destroy the barrier between nature and culture, thus finally having the “living” heritages featured by the active participation of communities and integration of intangible culture left to the later generations.
The milestone is, the Statement has nature and culture integrated into a brand new English word “culturenatures”, meaning the ICOMOS and the IUCN will join handsregarding the nature-culture integration value as an important index for the declaration and management of heritages.
Besides, Mr. Zhang Rouran was successfully selected as a young committee of the Scientific Committee on Cultural Tourism of ICOMOS on December 8, and he also directed a branch of the convention themed by "issues regarding the declaration and management of heritage landscapes in Asian-Pacific Region" together with Steve Brown (chairman of International Scientific Committee for Cultural Landscapes). In the branch, Mr. Zhang Rouran made an academic report themed by Pros and Cons of World Heritage Declaration and Management to Community Residents -- Taking Libo Karst in Guizhou Province as Example.
