research on conservation of cultural heritage

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• v.6(1); 2022 Jan

Heritage Conservation Future: Where We Stand, Challenges Ahead, and a Paradigm Shift

Jorge otero.

1 Department of Mineralogy and Petrology, University of Granada, Fuentenueva s/n, Granada 18002 Spain

Global cultural heritage is a lucrative asset. It is an important industry generating millions of jobs and billions of euros in revenue yearly. However, despite the tremendous economic and socio‐cultural benefits, little attention is usually paid to its conservation and to developing innovative big‐picture strategies to modernize its professional field. This perspective aims to compile some of the relevant current global needs to explore alternative ways for shaping future steps associated with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. From this perspective, it is conceptualized how emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and digital socio‐technological models of production based on democratic Peer‐2‐Peer (P2P) interactions can represent an alternative transformative solution by going beyond the current global communication and technical limitations in the heritage conservation community, while also providing novel digital tools to conservation practitioners, which can truly revolutionize the conservation decision‐making process and improve global conservation standards.

Cultural heritage is a lucrative asset. However, despite its tremendous worldwide economic and socio‐cultural benefits, little attention is usually paid to reflect on novel big‐picture strategies to modernize the conservation field. This perspective reviews some of the relevant current global challenges and conceptualizes how emerging digital‐social‐movements based on Peer‐2‐Peer interactions can represent a truly transformative solution to go beyond current needs.

1. Introduction

Cultural heritage refers to the legacy of tangible items (i.e., buildings, monuments, landscapes, books, textiles, paintings, or archaeological artifacts) and their intangible attributes (i.e., folklore, traditions, language, or performance arts) that are inherited from the past by a group or society and conserved for future generations due to their artistic, cultural, or historic value. [ 1 ] The act of preserving cultural heritage is known as Heritage Conservation, and it mostly focuses on doing everything possible to delay the natural laws of deterioration on tangible items to guarantee the transmission of its significant heritage messages and values for future generations. Current heritage conservation practice activities, which are mostly carried out by conservation practitioners (i.e., conservators–restorers and conservation technicians) in worldwide museums, conservation laboratories and monuments; widely involve activities such as the implementation of preventive actions (i.e., controlling the surrounding environmental conditions of items to mitigate damage), remedial activities (i.e., applying a conservation treatment to strengthen item's properties) or the application of a restoration process to bring decayed items as nearly as possible to their former condition. Conservation scientific research activities, which are mostly carried out by conservation scientists in worldwide universities and heritage research institutions, support the conservation practice providing scientific advances in the characterization of materials, the investigation of the material's degradation phenomena and the development of materials and technologies for their conservation and restoration. [ 2 ]

Cultural heritage represents nowadays one of the most important global industries and a substantial economic benefit for host countries, regions, and local communities. According to the latest studies made by the World Travel and Tourism Council, in 2019, cultural tourism represented 40% of all European tourism, generating 319 million jobs and producing more than 30 billion € in revenues every year. [ 3 ] Besides the economic asset and tourist attraction, cultural heritage also has a significant value as an identity factor contributing to social cohesion. [ 4 ] Despite the tremendous economic and socio‐cultural benefits, little attention and investment are usually taken on its conservation and/or to develop new strategies to modernize its practice activities. Machu Picchu, Taj Mahal, Petra or Angkor, among many other monuments with irreplaceable cultural heritage significance, are currently eroding at a noticeable rate [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ] and current global conservation activities are not completely succeeding in the implementation of quality conservation strategies to stop damage. [ 9 ] According to the latest heritage at risk report made by ICOMOS in 2020, [ 10 ]  ≈65% of the world's buildings with artistic and/or cultural interest currently present lack of maintenance and are in a poor state of conservation, which leads structures to a constant loss of its cultural, artistic, and economic value. Such loss has drawn recently the attention of the international political community, which has recognized the need to safeguard this heritage, as represented by one of the 169 specific targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 11.4). Inadequate environmental conditions, climate change, the massification of tourism, and insufficient management and resources are nowadays the major conservation threats to World Heritage Sites. [ 11 ] Considering that the cultural tourism industry has been globally growing, at a rate of 20–25% in the last 10 years before the COVID‐19 pandemic eruption, [ 12 ] added to the effect of global warming and the current high levels of pollution in urban areas, the decay of heritage items is expected to increase considerably in the next 10 years. [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ] This rapid deterioration is expected to be even more exacerbated in developing countries since conservation activities are often carried out by inexpert and/or untrained practitioners [ 18 ] which, in several cases, can increase damage up to 50%. [ 19 ] In this context, there is a pressing need to envision innovative solutions to develop different global strategies to go beyond the current global challenges in the heritage conservation community for better conservation outcomes and to continue enjoying the tremendous economic benefits derived from heritage more efficiently and sustainably for the benefit of global future generations.

On the other hand, cultural heritage conservation can also serve as a worldwide economic driving force, but especially in economically and socially marginalized communities in developing countries since it helps to generate local jobs, creation of opportunities for income‐generation and jobs (especially for youth and women), better learning opportunities for all, reducing inequality between social status or communities, improving professional competitiveness in skilled jobs and promoting cooperation between stakeholders and professional entities, increase tourism, and improve the quality visitor experience. [ 20 ] Besides the economic growth in developing countries, cultural heritage conservation enables sustainable development by enhancing the inhabitants’ sense of identity, feeling of connection, and improves people's well‐being. [ 21 ]

This communication aims to assemble some of the current global challenges in heritage conservation and propose an alternative paradigm for shaping up future steps associated with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

2. Global Challenges Ahead in Heritage Conservation

2.1. analysis of the heritage conservation scientific data.

The ability to uncover insights and trends in large amounts of data has been around since ancient times. Ancient Egyptians used the analysis of data to increase efficiency in tax collection or accurately predict the flooding of the river Nile every year. [ 22 ] However, data science, or “big data analysis,” has especially emerged in the last decade as a key new area of study having a tremendous impact in other scientific areas such as biology, medicine, or the development of smart‐green cities, which is able to extract new value from large complex unstructured data coming from differences sources. [ 23 , 24 , 25 ] The interest to study heritage materials is an old field of research, which started back in the XIX century where scientists such as Michael Faraday (1791–1867), [ 26 ] Friedrich W. Rathgen (1862–1942), [ 27 ] or A. W. von Hofmann (1818–1892) [ 28 ] had already drawn the attention to the study of the degradation phenomenon of heritage materials. However, to date, there has not been a single work on any macroperspective analysis or data science applied to the understanding and management of the conservation data from heritage. This is surprising especially for three reasons: i) studies of the heritage conservation are incredibly data‐rich and spread in a vast number of sources; ii) current research is still progressing without macroperspective directions; iii) most excellent scientific findings lack nowadays the adequate dissemination and are rarely transferred into practice.

I believe that, at this point, heritage conservation data requires the appropriate analysis in order to derive meaningful information crucial to help scientists and conservation research institutions to find new key areas of research and optimize research activities. At this point, should the emphasis of heritage conservation be placed on the development of new materials and new application procedures? Are most of the damage mechanisms already precisely understood and linked to visible decay patterns? Has there been significant uncover work that needs to be transferred to real practice? Have similar studies obtained similar results? Are the techniques and methods for evaluating heritage materials and decay processes accessible to conservation practitioners and is this methodology universally accepted by the scientific community? Can this methodology and findings be implemented by conservation practitioners also in developing countries? Does science need to provide more research to evaluate the long‐term durability of treatments? etc. In this light, I believe there is an urgent need to analyze the existing scientific data before continuing with more incremental research data to evaluate the direction in which research has been progressing and whether or not the current direction is proving fruitful.

But, how can we tackle such complex and macroscopical analysis? Big data technologies (software and data warehouse), together with the increased use of cloud‐based, high‐performance computing (algorithms), and artificial intelligence (AI), can create new opportunities for data analysis with tremendous benefits to any multidisciplinary and data‐rich fields as health, [ 29 ] history, [ 30 ] or even heritage conservation. [ 31 ] However, although these big data technologies could be very useful to extract unknown correlations, detect hidden patterns, detect areas of overproduction, areas that lack research or help us to obtain similarities or differences on similar projects, [ 32 ] those algorithms have currently difficulties to establishing qualitative analyses to highlight crucial findings, which can help us answer the mentioned questions; especially considering diverse and complex environments, [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ] such as the conservation of cultural heritage, which requires frequently the consensus/input of professionals with very different angles based on diverse expertise, context, and environments. Moreover, considering that the big data analysis is usually carried out by only one researcher or by a selected group of experts, this analysis has been found to be highly unconsciously biased by the researcher's previous experience/scientific position and often this big data analysis is not unanimously accepted on multidisciplinary environments involving different fields, academic positions, and research interests. [ 37 , 38 , 39 ] So, how can we provide the first step to create a summary of the conservation existing scientific findings that could be accepted consensually by both its scientific and practice community?

2.2. Reduce Inequalities: Bridge the Gap between Developed and Developing Countries

Scientific journals are still nowadays the principal channel for disseminating research results across the global scientific community. However, access to those scientific journals is highly expensive and also restricted to some developing countries, which is called by UNESCO “the information gap.” [ 40 ] In the developed world, the majority of research institutions and universities provide their scientists with unlimited updated online access to most scientific journals. [ 41 ] However, in developing countries, where most conservation is needed, most research institutions cannot afford them and scientists suffer from a serious lack of access to advanced and up‐to‐date peer‐reviewed scholarly literature. [ 42 ] A World Health Organization (WHO) survey conducted in 2000 [ 43 ] reported that ≈65% of research institutions in developing countries have no subscription to any international scientific journals. Another relevant survey published in Nature [ 44 ] revealed that only eight nations in the world produce 85% of total publications globally. Unfortunately, this isolation is unconsciously promoted by developed‐country scientists who are usually encouraged and expected to publish research in “high profile” journals to increase competitiveness. This, in turn, facilitates access to further research funding, but this also further accentuates the information gap between developed and developing countries. If such asymmetry in research output and access to up‐to‐date information remains a characteristic of the scientific world, then conservation practitioners and scientists in developing countries will remain isolated and their work will continue to have an important lack of updated technical expertise, which will affect directly the conservation of their cultural heritage. In this light, further initiatives in conservation should aim, as much as possible, to promote open‐science and provide a better, wider, and more equal access to knowledge.

2.3. Increase the Synergetic Exchange of Knowledge between Science and Practice: Promoting Interdisciplinary

It is widely accepted within the heritage conservation community that there is a considerable gap between science and practice. Closing this gap has been the theme of several conferences, books and international debates. [ 45 , 46 , 47 ] There are many reasons why this gap exists. First, a high number of papers published by conservation scientists in scientific journals are seldom read outside of the academic world and there are few incentives for researchers to bring their science into practice. On the other hand, conservation practitioners rarely publish and/or document any of their field/hands‐on experiences and experiments in a manner that can meaningfully inform conservation scientists. Other reasons, such as the lack of access to scientific literature (high cost of journals, as previously mentioned), the fact that each field has different professional goals and the limited relevance of conservation practitioners in the decision‐making process within heritage multidisciplinary projects, are factors that really exacerbate the divide. This is obviously added to a fear of a critical analysis at all levels of the conservation theory and practice by both sides. Additionally, since conservation science is a relatively new discipline, most conservation scientists are trained in one of the natural sciences (e.g., Physic, chemistry or engineering) who specialized in heritage conservation directly through employment or personal interest in cultural heritage. [ 48 ] They publish most of their findings in scientific Journals specialized in other disciplines, where practitioners have usually no connection to them and/or have no technical knowledge to correctly extract the information they need from them. During the last decade, new digital professional networks (mostly LinkedIn, Academia, and Research gate) have improved interdisciplinary global interactions between conservation peers, and are currently used as the main digital communication medium between heritage conservation professionals outside main international heritage organizations (i.e., ICON: Institute for Conservation; AIC: American Institute for Conservation; ECCO: European Confederation of Conservator‐Restorers’ Organizations; ENCORE: European Network for Conservation‐Restoration Education; ICOM‐CC: International Council of Museums; IIC: International Institute for Conservation; and ICOMOS: International Council on Monuments and Sites). However, although those networks are very effective platforms to share new research and new published experiences, neither of them allows high levels of user's interaction in order to create discussion/dialogue on research outputs or consensually organize and summarize findings to create new knowledge. Additionally, they barely allow documenting any unpublished experiences of remarkable observations obtained by practitioners (or scientists) on their hands‐on experience in a manner that can be useful to other heritage professionals. In this context, it is clear that new strategies are needed to create a greater synergy between science and practice.

2.4. Document, Transmit, and Preserve the Current Knowledge Contained in Practice Activities

Conservation practice activities carried out by practitioners are highly observational, “knowledge gained by experience” and require a high level of manual dexterity for the use of tools and analytical methods. Furthermore, success or failure in interventions is often highly influenced by the practitioner's skill and experience. [ 49 , 50 , 51 ] In several cases, conservation practice activities are traditional methods passed from generation to generation, such as the Mughal‐era tile conservation method in India [ 52 ] or earthen architectural conservation skills in Mali, [ 53 ] which present the serious risk to disappear without being properly documented. [ 54 ] In this context, global conservation online forums within international heritage organizations currently provide the main communication vehicle where practitioners can organize in professional groups based on their expertise to share knowledge and create discussion on specific topics. However, although those conventional digital forums are effective as a knowledge‐sharing vehicle, this conventional way of professional interactions do not allow users to document, organize into categories, and summarize experience and knowledge that can create new added value. This is added to other factors such as the lack of open‐access accessibility to those forums (membership) and that rarely contemplate accessible video tutorials to stimulate training for other professionals.

2.5. Create a More Participatory System to Understand and Disseminate the Current Scientific Knowledge

“Dissemination of research ensures that research communities are able to build on existing knowledge, highlight new discoveries, and do not duplicate efforts in either research or implementation” (UNESCO, 2008). [ 55 ] The amount of currently available heritage scientific data is overwhelming. The conservation science field, as in other scientific fields, went from a significant lack of data to a data deluge in just 30 years. [ 56 ] Large heritage research databases exist (e.g., AATA, JTOR, or ICOMOS library) at different scales, but can conservation scientists efficiently track this large amount of unstructured new data? And, are the most remarkable findings really reaching the practitioners? In reality, few researches are properly disseminated beyond academia to make a real impact in the practical field. However, even when research is accordingly disseminated through professional platforms (e.g., Research‐gate or Academia), indexed in online repositories (e.g., Scopus or Web of Science), presented in heritage recognized conferences (e.g., ICOM‐CC or IIC) and included in heritage digital libraries, due to the high complexity of the conservation field, it is difficult to establish reliable comparisons among current research and data. I have to constantly face this complexity in my professional scientific field. For example, one of my current research interests studies the consolidation effectiveness of nanolime when applied to a historic structure. However, its effectiveness has been discovered to be influenced by many factors such as its concentration (g L −1 ), solvent, application method, amount of product applied, application procedure, crystallinity, size and surface area of the nanolime particle, type of substrate, product storage time, pore size distribution, and mineralogical composition of the substrate or relative humidity conditions during the curing time. [ 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 ] This wide range of variables makes it extremely difficult to draw accurate and reliable comparisons among current research findings, which often requires a personal communication (e.g., videoconference meetings, phone calls, or emails) between involved scientists to draw common conclusions on specific topics. Conventional mentioned e‐libraries and networks allow the visualization of our new research findings, but do not allow us high levels of user's coordination in order to discuss, compare, and classify while building on a commonly agreed shared knowledge for the benefit of other scientists and the practice.

2.6. Assist Global Practitioners with Tools to Enhance Their Conservation Activities

According to a well‐known work carried out by the heritage architect J. Fidler in 2005, [ 18 ] about 60% of global conservation and maintenance activities are nowadays carried out by inexpert and/or untrained practitioners, which in several cases, can increase damage up to 50%, especially in developing countries. [ 19 ] This is obviously the result of the mentioned high complexity of the heritage conservation field, the importance of the practitionerś skills and experience and the lack of a consensus scientific knowledge to support practice activities. One of the most difficult tasks that practitioners face in their activities is the identification of decay patterns and the decision about what type of protective treatment should be applied based on the huge complex context (type of substrate, material's properties, decay processes involved, and compatible products), which requires a comprehensive study. However, in practical cases, decisions about interventions are usually left to the last possible moment and sometimes they are made without a thorough study. [ 62 ] In this context, there is an urgent need to develop new strategies to organize, summarize, and disseminate existing knowledge that could assist practitioners (conservation encyclopedia) during their decision‐making process on the field.

3. The Possible Way Forward: A Paradigm Shift to Overcome Current Limitations in Heritage Conservation Based on the Commons‐Based Peer Production Model (CBPP)

CBPP is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler, [ 63 ] which describes a model of socio‐economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively for common benefits, especially over the internet (e.g., Wikipedia). This new model has been previously described by Prof. Elinor Ostrom (Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons, 2009) who claimed at her well‐known communication at Science [ 64 ] that these Peer‐to‐Peer (P2P) networks were a promising strategy for addressing several contemporary professional problems as they stimulate dialogue among peers which favors consensus, connects millions of users from all over the world and creates new shared value. One of the major characteristics of these commons‐based peer production communities is its usually nonprofit scope, open‐access aim, reduced hierarchy among peers, and that participation is mostly voluntary based on the complementary professional expertise of their users who work together to create new common shared value in an ecosystem of cooperation where all can benefit from it. [ 65 , 66 ]

Over the last 10 years, studies on P2P networks have enjoyed a meteoric rise. [ 67 ] This new model of production seems to be a prevailing driving force in Europe and grasped already the attention of the European Commission (EC), which funded several initiatives (mostly around Culture) to study the transformative potential these communing practices might have toward the improvement of economic dynamics and working and living conditions in Europe. [ 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 ] This new socio‐technological model is clearly expected to fully flourish in this following decade and is expected to create new models of production, novel forms of society, and innovative social aggregation for community shared benefits. [ 64 , 65 ]

4. Conclusions and Outlook

4.1. the transformative potential of cbpp in heritage conservation.

I believe that this new way of production could represent a transformative solution to go beyond our conventional working method and to solve some of the current global challenges in heritage conservation since it could allow heritage professionals, from all over the world, to organize into digital communities and cooperatively and horizontally work to create a completely new shared value. These digital communities can be specifically created to document, exchange, transmit skills; preserve unpublished remarkable conservation practice observations or organize current knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia). I specifically hypothesize that, inspired by the Wikipedia initiative, the heritage conservation community could create similar initiatives to organize current scientific knowledge in a wiki‐like conservation encyclopedia. This initiative could provide a solution to tackle the complex and macroscopical analysis of the current large and unstructured scientific knowledge. This is because of the nature of content production in these types of platforms. Since content is constantly created and self‐controlled by the complementary and multidisciplinary expertise of all users, the organization and analysis of knowledge are undertaken consensually taking into consideration the input of all heritage professionals (i.e., scientists, conservators, architects, surveyors, technicians, archaeologists, curators, etc.) with very different angles in terms of professional vision (practice or science), environmental weather conditions issues, accessibility of materials or resources. This new way of production could allow evading the current “bias issues” concerning the traditional big data analysis while providing a representative vision of the global common knowledge, being also in a constant update. Additionally, considering the current accuracy of Wikipedia—Nature investigations found that Wikipedia is very close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries [ 73 ] —this initiative could also provide significant levels of data quality, precision, and accuracy.

This new way of production based on peer cooperation and consensus‐driven structures can also help to mitigate the other existing global heritage challenges. For example, it can contribute to reducing the current inequalities between developed and developing countries since the access to knowledge could be less restrictive reducing the UNESCO‐called “information gap.” It can also improve the synergetic exchange of knowledge between science and practice promoting a real horizontal interdisciplinary interaction of all heritage professionals based on different geographical regions, socio‐economic environments, and environments. Additionally, possible initiatives such as this open‐source conservation encyclopedia can also help mitigate other global heritage challenges since it could contribute to creating a more participatory system to disseminate the current scientific knowledge (open‐science). These initiatives could also assist global heritage practitioners with new tools to enhance their conservation activities while increasing the capabilities and skills of other unskilled practitioners, promoting better learning opportunities for all, reducing inequality, and improving global competitiveness in skilled jobs.

Besides the direct benefits to the conservation practice global community, the successful implementation of Peer‐to‐Peer digital professional networks in the form of open‐source encyclopedia or a sharing‐information network can also represent a universal benefit for economically and socially marginalized communities in developing countries, since it could allow local communities to better self‐organize, self‐train, and self‐manage their cultural heritage; especially in areas with no Heritage Management Plan or with a serious lack of resources. This is contrary to the conventional working method within the conservation community, which has been largely criticized in the past for mostly benefiting the professional conservation community without considering its influence on local communities. [ 74 , 75 , 76 ]

This emerging socio‐professional production ecosystem is completely aligned with the fundamental values and main goals of the UN Agenda2030 for Sustainable Development in terms of promoting democratization, open science, open‐access learning opportunities, productive work, equitable quality interdisciplinary, assist with economic development, and also reducing inequalities within and among countries (Goals 4, 8, 10, and 17).

I believe that these emerging socio‐technological networks can serve our cultural heritage conservation professional field as innovative strategies to transform the professional field. It could provide a better, wider, and more equal access to knowledge while assisting global scientists and practitioners with new tools (e.g., a conservation encyclopedia created by its own community that professionals can check during conservation decision processes), which could truly revolutionize how heritage conservation professionals currently face heritage interventions; for the benefit of global conservation standards.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

J.O.'s current research was funded by the European Commission on the Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Actions (MSCA‐IF) from the European Union's Horizon 2020 on research and innovation, grant agreement no. 893762 (NANOMORT). The author thanks his professional mentors in Heritage Conservation Prof. A. Elena Charola (Smithsonian Institution, USA), Prof. Heather A. Viles (University of Oxford, UK), and Prof. Carlos Rodriguez‐Navarro (University of Granada, ESP) who helped him in one way or the other to develop some of the critical reasonings included in this communication. The author especially thanks Prof. Koenraad Van Balen (KU Leuven, BEL) for initializing him into Prof. Ostrom's research, and in this novel ecosystem of production based on the commons and especially its possible impact on heritage conservation future. The view and opinions of the author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the University of Granada, the European Commission, or the mentioned mentors.

Jorge Otero is a research‐fellow at the University of Granada (UGR, ESP). He holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering from Sheffield Hallam University (UK). He specializes in the characterization of masonry materials, their degradation phenomena, and the development of technologies for their conservation. He is now the PI of the Horizon2020‐funded NANOMORT‐project. Before joining UGR, he was a postdoc researcher at the Getty Conservation Institute (USA), an intern at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute (USA) and the Institute of Conservation (ICON, UK). He is a member of ICOMOS and coauthor of the open‐access “Built Heritage Evaluation Manual” published by the Smithsonian Scholarly Press.

Otero J., Heritage Conservation Future: Where We Stand, Challenges Ahead, and a Paradigm Shift . Global Challenges 2022, 6 , 2100084. 10.1002/gch2.202100084 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

Dedicated to Prof. A. Elena Charola (Emeritus Research Scientist at the Museum Conservation Institute of the Smithsonian Institution, formerly Research Scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ICCROM, and the University of Pennsylvania) on the occasion of her retirement

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Cultural heritage: 7 successes of UNESCO’s preservation work

The power of preserving cultural heritage to build a better world

Why do we go to great lengths to preserve culture and make it bloom? Culture is a resource for the identity and cohesion of communities. In today’s interconnected world, it is also one of our most powerful resources to transform societies and renew ideas. It is UNESCO’s role to provide the tools and skills we need to make the most of its ultimate renewable energy.

Historical landmarks, living heritage and natural sites enrich our daily lives in countless ways, whether we experience them directly or through the medium of a connected device. Cultural diversity and creativity are natural drivers of innovation. In many ways, artists, creators and performers help us change our perspective on the world and rethink our environment. These are precious assets to respond to current global challenges, from the climate crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The notion of culture has greatly evolved over the last 75 years. UNESCO’s actions over the past decades bear witness to the many ways in which humanity tried to understand how culture can strengthen the sense of who we are – from the awareness of the necessity to protect heritage from destruction at the end of World War II, to the launch of international campaigns to safeguard World Heritage sites and the concept of living and intangible heritage, a focus on creative economy and the need to sustain cultural jobs and livelihoods. Our relationship with culture has deeply evolved over the last century. If we look into the past, we might be better prepared to tackle further changes ahead.

The United States will be participating in an international effort which has captured the imagination and sympathy of people throughout the world. By thus contributing to the preservation of past civilizations, we will strengthen and enrich our own.

Abu Simbel – We do not have to choose between the living and the dead

A few minutes before sunrise, thousands of visitors line up inside the temple of Abu Simbel, holding their breath. They are about to witness a rare phenomenon that has taken place twice a year for the last 3,000 years. Every February and October at 6:29 am, the light of the rising sun pierces through the narrow entrance. The rays penetrate over 70 metres deep across the giant pillared hall up to the inner sanctuary, illuminating the statue of the man who built the temple during the 13th century BC, Pharaoh Ramses II.

Carved out of a rocky hill, the Temple of the Rising Sun had been conceived to show the might of Egypt’s greatest pharaoh to the Nubian people in the Upper Nile. Over time, the great temple and the smaller buildings became covered in sand and lay forgotten for centuries, until their rediscovery in 1813. The supreme example of ancient Egypt’s knowledge of astronomy and the skill of its architects could be admired again.

But just over a century later, the southernmost relics of this ancient human civilization were threatened with underwater oblivion and destruction by the rising waters of the Nile following the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The construction of the Dam was meant to develop agriculture as well as Egyptian independence and economy, and triggered a global debate that has fuelled media front pages and discussions ever since: should we have to choose between the monuments of the past and a thriving economy for the people living today? Why should people care for ancient stones and buildings when so many people need food and emergency assistance?

In the course of an unprecedented safeguarding campaign to save the temples of Egypt, UNESCO demonstrated that humanity does not have to sacrifice the past to thrive in the present – quite the opposite. Monuments of outstanding universal value help us understand who we are and also represent massive opportunities for development. Two millennia after a Greek author and scientist drew the famous list of the world’s seven wonders, the very notion of World Heritage came to life.

The race against time began in 1964 , when experts from 50 nations started working together under the coordination of UNESCO in one of the greatest challenges of archaeological engineering in history. The entire site was carefully cut into large blocks, dismantled, lifted and reassembled in a new location 65 metres higher and 200 metres back from the river, preserving it for future generations.

Today, the four majestic statues that guard the entrance to the great temple stare at the river and the rising sun every day. As they did 3,000 years ago. The success of the international cooperation to save Abu Simbel raised awareness about the fact that all over the world there are places of outstanding universal value. Just like the Nile valley temples, they must be protected from many threats such as armed conflict, deliberate destruction, economic pressure, natural disasters and climate change.

The World Heritage Convention was adopted in 1972 as the most important global instrument to establish this notion, bringing all nations together in the pursuit of the preservation of the World’s Natural and Cultural Heritage. With its 194 signatory Member States, it is today one of the world’s most ratified conventions.

How is a site inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List?

For a site to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, it must first be nominated by the country where it is located. The nomination is examined by international experts who decide whether the inclusion is justified. Finally, the World Heritage Committee, a body of 21 UNESCO elected Member States, takes a vote.

Venice – Can the safeguard of cultural heritage and global tourism coexist?

Launched only a few years after the Nubian temples initiative, the safeguarding campaign for Venice was a response to various challenges including the rising waters and the explosion of global tourism.

Stepping  outside the railway station early on an autumnal morning, visitors are met with the view of the chilly air colliding with the water, forming a thick, soft blanket of fog over the Grand Canal, the ‘main street’ of Venice. The church of San Simeone Piccolo, with its oversized dome and slender neoclassical columns, and the neighbouring buildings appear to be floating on the water of the lagoon. It’s a sight that has welcomed millions of visitors from all over the world since the heydays of the Serenissima, when the city ruled as one of Europe’s economic superpowers.

Yet, the breath-taking beauty that inspired countless painters, writers and artists over the centuries remains fragile and at risk of being lost forever. Like the Abu Simbel temples, the city’s survival is threatened by rising water levels. The inexorable increase in sea level has caused flooding to become a regular occurrence. Humidity and microorganisms are eating away the long wooden piles that early dwellers drove deep into the muddy ground of the lagoon to build the first foundations of Venice, 1,600 years ago.

After 1966, the year of the worst flooding in Venice’s history, UNESCO and the Italian Government launched a major campaign to save the city. An ambitious project involving giant mobile flood gates was undertaken to temporarily isolate the lagoon from the high tides and protect the lowest areas from flooding. Thirty years later there is unanimous agreement on the successful results both of the technical achievements and international cooperation.

But Venice still needs attentive care, and its continued survival calls for unflagging vigilance. The city remains threatened on several fronts – mass tourism, the potential damage of subsequent urban development and the steady stream of giant cruise ships crushing its brittle foundations.

International mobilization and pressure around the status of Venice led to the Italian Government’s decision in 2021 to ban large ships from the city centre, as a necessary step to protect the environmental, landscape, artistic and cultural integrity of Venice. This decision came a few days after UNESCO announced its intention to inscribe the city on its World Heritage in Danger list. Until a permanent big cruise docking place is identified and developed, liners will be permitted to pull up in Marghera, an industrial suburb of Venice. Such decisions illustrate the great complexity of protecting historic cities and cultural heritage urban centres, which in this particular situation called for tailor-made measures and techniques different from those implemented for the safeguarding of the fabled Egyptian temples.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

Angkor – A successful example of longstanding international cooperation

Deep in the forests of Cambodia, in the Siem Reap Province, the five lotus-flower-shaped towers of majestic Angkor Wat soar towards the sky. When approaching from the main gate, the vast scale of the temple and the precise symmetry of the buildings are awe inspiring. This is the world's largest religious monument.

Angkor Wat was part of a sprawling city as big as London, the heart of an empire that between the 9th and 15th centuries extended from southern Vietnam to Laos, and from the Mekong River to Eastern Myanmar. By around 1500 A.D., the Khmer capital was abandoned, most likely after heavy floods and lengthy droughts. Its temples, buildings and complex irrigation network were swallowed by the surrounding forests and lay hidden until their rediscovery in 1860.

By the early 1990s, the site was under major threat, with many of the temples at high risk of collapse and several sites looted. Conservation work at Angkor had not been possible since the outbreak of the civil war, the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime and the following civil unrest.

Angkor Wat’s inclusion in UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1992 marked a milestone in the country’s recovery after years of conflict. The UNESCO-backed preservation of the temples aimed to assist in nation-building and national reconciliation. The action of the International Coordinating Committee (link is external) (ICC-Angkor) for the safeguarding and development of this exceptional cultural site is a striking example of international solidarity and testifies to one of UNESCO's most impressive achievements for heritage. Thirty countries and an ad hoc experts group for scientific, restoration and conservation projects were brought together under an innovative approach, closely linking safeguarding operations to sustainable development efforts.

In 25 years, Angkor has thus become a living laboratory demonstrating the potential of sustainable tourism and crafts, with the mobilization of local communities for social cohesion in 112 villages. The gigantic site now supports 700,000 inhabitants and attracts some five million visitors whose flow must be managed each year. The park authorities are carrying out several projects aimed at improving the lives of communities through the implementation of sustainable tourism that respects local sensitivities. The removal from UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger just fourteen years later is a credit to the Cambodian people.

The fact that a project of such magnitude was successfully carried out in a country emerging from more than two decades of conflict in 1992 is a testament to the potential of the World Heritage Convention and the international solidarity led by UNESCO.

Walking through the temple, I saw reminders of the prosperous civilization that built it: hundreds of beautiful figures carved into the walls telling the stories of these ancient people; wide galleries they must have prayed in; long hallways lined with pillars they must have walked down.

No one knows for sure what caused the empire to abandon this temple and the surrounding city, but in the 15th century almost everyone left. Trees grew over the stones. Only Buddhist monks stayed behind to care for — and pray in — the hidden temples.

But that didn’t stop pilgrims and visitors from continuing to journey here to take in these incredible structures. And now, centuries later, I couldn’t be more thankful to count myself as one of these visitors

Mostar – Symbols do matter, in war and peace

It’s the end of July in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Peak summer means an influx of tourists to the cobbled alleys of Mostar. The cosy medieval town has a long, rich history marked by the peaceful coexistence of three communities: Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Once they arrive in town, visitors from all over the world make a beeline for Mostar’s most emblematic monument, the Old Bridge.

A masterpiece of Ottoman architecture, Stari Most – as it’s known locally – is a symbol of the different communities that have existed side-by-side in the area. Since the 16th century, the bridge had brought them together across the Neretva river – until the Bosnian war. The bridge was a symbol of unity between the Bosnian community (Muslim), in the east of the city, and the Croats and Serbs to the west. The bridge of Mostar (of Ottoman, therefore Muslim origin) served as a link between all these communities – as a pedestrian bridge, it had no military or strategic value. Its destruction in 1993 was only meant to force the communities to separate, to deny their mixing with their neighbours. The bridge was in ruins and, with it, the values of peace and understanding this centuries-old structure had embodied.

Five years later, UNESCO coordinated a reconstruction project to rebuild the Old Bridge. Despite the scars of the war that are still visible today on the city walls, the reconstructed bridge has now become a symbol of reconciliation and post-conflict healing.

Today, the crowds jam the street to watch the traditional diving contest from the top of the bridge, a long-held custom resumed once Stari Most was restored to its former glory. Every July, young people of Mostar’s three communities compete with courage by jumping into the river 29 metres below, just like they did before the war.

For over four years after the ceasefire, former enemies worked together to retrieve the stones from the riverbed and rebuild their former symbol of friendship. Reconstructed in 2004 and inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2006, Stari Most today is a bridge between a common past and a common future. It is certainly not enough to rebuild a bridge to restore confidence and rebuild peace in a war-torn society. But it certainly matters to care for the symbols of peace.

I was in my office, working to the sound of mortar fire, when we heard the cries in the street – cries that the bridge had fallen. And what happened then was so impressive that I will never forget it. Everyone came out to see. Grenades and bombs were falling everywhere, but still they came out of their hiding places: young and old, weak and strong, Muslim and Christian, they all came, all crying. Because that bridge was part of our identity. It represented us all.

Timbuktu – When warlords target heritage, peacemakers respond with more heritage

Sitting at the gateway to the Sahara Desert, Timbuktu conjures images of a mythical city at the end of the world, where Arab and African merchants would travel from afar to trade salt, gold, cattle and grain. In the English language, the city in northern Mali has come to represent a place far away. Undaunted, caravans still ply the cross-desert route and come to the city several times a year. They carry rock salt extracted from the northern Sahara, just like their ancestors did for centuries.

In its heyday, during the 16th century, the city had 100,000 inhabitants, as its mosques and holy sites played an essential role in the spread of Islam in Africa. The city became an important centre of learning in Africa and its libraries the repository of at least 700,000 historical manuscripts on art, science and medicine, as well as copies of the Qur’an. These manuscripts, written in ornate calligraphy, bear witness to the richness of African history and intellectual life.

During the conflict of 2012–2013, more than 4,000 of the 40,000 manuscripts kept at the Ahmed Baba Institute were lost. Some were burnt or stolen, while more than 10,000 remained in a critical condition. The inhabitants of Timbuktu helped save their precious heritage by secretly spiriting away more than 300,000 manuscripts to the capital, Bamako. Other texts were sheltered between mud walls or buried. Although protected from immediate destruction, the manuscripts are now preserved in conditions that may not safeguard them for future generations.

To help preserve Timbuktu’s cultural heritage and encourage reconciliation, UNESCO has been supporting the local communities to take part in ancient manuscript conservation projects and ensure their lasting preservation for humanity.

UNESCO has coordinated the work to rebuild the fourteen mausoleums inscribed on the World Heritage List, as well as the Djingareyber and Sidi Yaha mosques, that were deliberately destroyed by armed groups during the conflict.

The reconstruction of Timbuktu’s devastated cultural heritage aimed to foster reconciliation among communities and restore trust and social cohesion. An important aspect of the project was the drive to include the reconstruction of the mausoleums in an overall strategy aimed at revitalizing building traditions and ensuring their continuity, through on-the-job training activities and conservation projects.

To ensure the rebuilt shrines matched the old ones as closely as possible, the reconstruction work was checked against old photos and local elders were consulted. Local workers used traditional methods and local materials, including alhor stone, rice stalks and banco – a mixture of clay and straw.

The destruction of the mausoleums of Timbuktu has been a shock, and a clear turning point revealing the importance taken of culture and heritage in modern conflicts fuelled by violent extremism and fundamentalist ideologies. It has shown how strongly fundamentalists are willing to destroy other Islamic cultures, and any other vision which differs from their own. Similar direct destruction of Islamic, pre-Islamic, Christian or Jewish heritage, has then been seen in Iraq and Syria. The need to restore heritage has become far more than a mere cultural issue – it has become a security issue, and a key component for the resilience and further cohesion of societies torn by conflicts.

At present, the monuments in Timbuktu are living heritage, closely associated with religious rituals and community gatherings. Their shape and form have always evolved over time both with annual cycles (that of the rain and the erosion of the plastering); that of regular maintenance (every three to five years); repairs of structural pathologies, often adding buttresses; and at times more important works, including extensions and raising of the roof structure. How to take that into account while trying to guide and assist the local people in their self-capacity, their resilience in keeping their heritage as they have done for over 600 years? What should be done and to what extent? Who should be responsible for what? These are tricky questions of heritage preservation, far beyond the mere inscription of a site on the famous World Heritage list.

Salt comes from north, gold from south and silver from the land of Whites, but the Word of God, the famous things, histories and fairy tales, we only find them in Timbuktu.

Preserving cultural identity and Korean traditions: The bond of living heritage

It’s the end of November in the countryside near Jeonju, the capital of the North Jeolla Province. The weather is getting chilly and winter is just a couple of weeks away.

It’s time to prepare for the long, icy-cold season. It’s time to make kimchi.

The Republic of Korea’s staple food is a side dish of salted and fermented vegetables that makes its appearance at every meal. It’s not just the country’s emblematic dish: its preparation ( kimjang ) is a community event.

Housewives monitor weather forecasts to determine the most favourable date and temperature for preparing kimchi. Entire families, friends and neighbours gather together to make it. The process is rather laborious and requires many hands to process the large quantities of vegetables required to last throughout the winter months. They all work together, exchange tips and tighten their relationships through kimjang. Families take turns making kimchi to form closer bonds.

Today, the entire village will get together in one of the houses for the occasion. Together, they will wash the napa cabbage that was pickled in salt the night before and mix in the seasonings that will give kimchi its unique sour-and-spicy flavour. The specific methods and ingredients are transmitted from mother to daughter so that kimjang culture is preserved through the generations.

Since 2013, kimjang has been included in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as an important part of Korean culture, embodying the country’s cooperative and sharing team spirit. Kimjang is a vital cultural asset of a community and worth preserving and celebrating for the rest of humanity. Even though there may be regional differences in the preparation of kimchi, it transcends class, regional and even national borders.

Cultural practices often precede the instauration of national borders and the start of conflict among its citizens. Shared cultural practices may even be a path to reconciliation. 

Such hopes materialized in 2018, when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea decided to work together to submit a joint submission for traditional wrestling as an element of UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Ssirum/Ssireum (wrestling) is a physical game and a popular form of entertainment widely enjoyed all across the Korean peninsula. In the North, two opponents try to push each other to the ground using a satpa (a fabric strap connecting the waist and leg), their torso, hands and legs. Ssirum/Ssireum is distinguished by the use of the satpa and the awarding of a bull to the winner. In the South, Ssirum/Ssireum is a type of wrestling in which two players wearing long fabric belts around their waists and one thigh grip their opponents’ belt and deploy various techniques to send them to the ground. The winner of the final game for adults is awarded an ox, symbolizing agricultural abundance, and the title of ‘Jangsa’.

As an approachable sport involving little risk of injury, Ssirum/Ssireum also offers a means to improve mental and physical health. Koreans are widely exposed to Ssirum/Ssireum traditions within their families and local communities: children learn the wrestling skills from family members; local communities hold annual open wrestling tournaments; its instruction is also provided in schools.

Following UNESCO’s mediation, the two States Parties agreed for their respective nomination files to be jointly examined by the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in November 2018. UNESCO welcomed this initiative of regional cooperation and, through a historic decision, inscribed "Traditional Korean wrestling (Ssirum/Ssireum)" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as a joint inscription from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea. While the Lists of the Convention include several examples of multinational nominations prepared by several States (from couscous to the art of falconry and the Mediterranean diet), the coming together of the two States Parties for the joint inscription of Korean traditional wrestling by the Committee is unprecedented. It marks a highly symbolic step on the road to inter-Korean reconciliation. It is also a victory for the longstanding and profound ties between both sides of the inter-Korean border, and for the role cultural diplomacy may have in international relations.

It was the time when the women would gather and gossip. There would be matchmaking. There would be some marriages that came about during the time of kimchi making.

Promoting culture in a post-COVID-19 world

The cultural and creative industries are among the fastest growing sectors in the world. With an estimated global worth of US$ 4.3 trillion per year, the culture sector now accounts for 6.1 per cent of the global economy. They generate annual revenues of US$ 2,250 billion and nearly 30 million jobs worldwide, employing more people aged 15 to 29 than any other sector. The cultural and creative industries have become essential for inclusive economic growth, reducing inequalities and achieving the goals set out in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

The adoption of the 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was a milestone in international cultural policy. Through this historic agreement, the global community formally recognized the dual nature, both cultural and economic, of contemporary cultural expressions produced by artists and cultural professionals. Shaping the design and implementation of policies and measures that support the creation, production, distribution of and access to cultural goods and services, the 2005 Convention is at the heart of the creative economy.

Recognizing the sovereign right of States Parties to maintain, adopt and implement policies to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expression, both nationally and internationally, the 2005 Convention supports governments and civil society in finding policy solutions for emerging challenges.

Based on human rights and fundamental freedoms, the 2005 Convention ultimately provides a new framework for informed, transparent and participatory systems of governance for culture.

A constant rethinking of culture and heritage

The history of UNESCO bears witness to the deep transformation of the concept of culture over the past decades. From global Conventions mostly dealing with building and stones in the 60’s and 70’s, the international cooperation opened new fronts for the protection and promotion of culture, including intangible cultural heritage, cultural diversity and creative economy. The definition of "culture" was spearheaded by the committee led by former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar and the Mondiacult Conference in 1982. In 2022, the global Mondiacult conference is expected to take stock of progress made in the past 40 years in cultural policies, and re-imagine its future in a post-COVID-19 world.

Have a look at these World Heritage sites

The 30,000-kilometre-long road system was built by the Inca Empire across mountains, valleys, rainforests and deserts to link the Inca capital, Cuzco, with distant areas of the empire, from the Amazon to the Andes. Thanks to its sheer scale, Qhapaq Ñan is a unique achievement of engineering skills, highlighting the Incas' mastery of construction technology.

The granting of World Heritage status in 2019 has made its trail – which every year sees thousands of visitors on their way to the area’s archaeological sites such as Machu Picchu in Peru – eligible for much-needed restoration funds.

Borobudur Temple Compound

Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world and one of the great archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. This imposing Buddhist temple, dating from the 8th and 9th centuries, is located in central Java. It was built in three tiers: a pyramidal base with five concentric square terraces, the trunk of a cone with three circular platforms and, at the top, a monumental stupa. The walls and balustrades are decorated with fine low reliefs, covering a total surface area of 2,500 m 2 . Around the circular platforms are 72 openwork stupas, each containing a statue of the Buddha. The monument was restored with UNESCO's help in the 1970s.

Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan

This cultural landscape was simultaneously inscribed on the World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2003. The property is in a fragile state of conservation, having suffered from abandonment, military action and dynamite explosions. Parts of the site are inaccessible due to the presence of anti-personnel mines.

Related items

• Lists and designations
• Intangible cultural heritage
• Intangible heritage
• Diversity of Cultural Expressions-2005 Convention
• Intangible Cultural Heritage-2003 Convention
• Underwater Cultural Heritage-2001 Convention
• World Heritage 1972 Convention
• Fight Illicit Trafficking-1970 Convention
• Armed Conflict and Heritage-1954 Convention
• Culture & Sustainable Development
• UNESCO Creative Cities Network

Sustainable Conservation of Cultural Heritage: A Global Responsibility. Sichuan Towers Case Study

• Published: 08 April 2009
• Volume 16 , pages 379–387, ( 2009 )

Cite this article

• Marta Bordignon 1 ,
• Lisa Corsi 2 ,
• Diego De Gasperis 2 ,
• Beibei Liu 2 ,
• Karolina Lukasiewicz 3 ,
• Lorenzo Miccoli 2 &
• Zhonghui Qian 2  

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This paper has been developed in the framework of a larger research program, in which the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Tsinghua University and Yangzhou University are jointly involved to study and preserve historic towers. Cultural heritage is the intangible and tangible attributes of a society, including the natural heritage, that are inherited from past generations, preserved in the present and granted for the next generations. Nowadays we consider the cultural heritage as a world heritage belonging to all the people of the world, irrespective on which territory they are located. This paper presents a model and a methodological hypothesis to conserve cultural heritage in a sustainable way throughout the case study of Sichuan Towers (China) that could become an example for other cultural sites around the world, connecting the environmental and socio-economical aspect to the tourism development.

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Chen J (2006) Fascinating Danba. China Traveling Press, Beijing

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Marta Bordignon

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Lisa Corsi, Diego De Gasperis, Beibei Liu, Lorenzo Miccoli & Zhonghui Qian

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Bordignon, M., Corsi, L., De Gasperis, D. et al. Sustainable Conservation of Cultural Heritage: A Global Responsibility. Sichuan Towers Case Study. Transit Stud Rev 16 , 379–387 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11300-009-0065-2

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• Published: 17 March 2023

Natural world heritage conservation and tourism: a review

• Zhenzhen Zhang 1 , 2 ,
• Kangning Xiong 1 , 2 &
• Denghong Huang 1 , 2  

Heritage Science volume  11 , Article number:  55 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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The trade-off and synergy between heritage conservation and tourism has become the focus of natural world heritage research. To gain a better understanding of the global researches on natural World Heritage conservation and tourism, we comprehensively reviewed relevant peer-reviewed research literature based on Web of Science (WOS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). We find that (1) the theoretical research of natural heritage conservation and tourism has gone through a process from emphasizing the protection of heritage value to pursuing the synergy of heritage protection and tourism development; (2) the main research methods include investigation research methods, indirect research methods and experimental research methods; (3) "3S" technology (remote sensing, geographic information system, global positioning system), three-dimensional laser scanning technology, virtual reality (VR) technology, augmented reality (AR) technology, holographic projection technology and other modern technological means are applied to the protection and tourism development of natural properties; (4) the common coordinated development models include ecological science tourism, community participation in tourism, ecological compensation model, world heritage—buffer zone—surrounding areas coordinated protection model and so on. We analyzed the research progresses through (1) the theories proposed in the literature, (2) the main methods applied to address the issues on natural heritage conservation and tourism, (3) the technologies applied in the researches and (4) the coordinated models of heritage conservation and tourism. Furthermore, we put forward the following research prospects: (1) systematically explore the conservation methods and theories based on world heritage criteria; (2) formulate corresponding conservation systems and ecological restoration standards for different types of world heritage; (3) give full play to the complementary advantages of various research methods and reveal the mutual feedback mechanism between tourism and heritage conservation; (4) develop ecological restoration technology based on biodiversity restoration, establish radial ecological corridor, and expand the benign ecological environment of the properties to wider periphery; (5) build ecological compensation development models based on the perspective of heritage tourism and value realization of world heritage.

Introduction

Natural world heritage sites are natural landscapes recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and inscribed on the World Heritage List, with Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) such as containing aesthetic importance, representing major stages of earth's history, representing significant on-going ecological and biological processes, containing the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity [ 1 ]. As the type of protected area with the highest and most representative OUV in the world [ 2 , 3 ], how to pass on the value of the world heritage through heritage display and solve the livelihood problem of the residents is a problem worthy of study.

For many years after the birth of Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention) in 1972, conservation was the sole goal of World Heritage, but as time passed, World Heritage gradually established its status as an important tourist destination, and UNESCO’s policy on World Heritage also no longer limited to conservation, but also sustainable tourism [ 4 ]. The purpose of heritage conservation is to preserve their OUV and pass them on intact to the next generation [ 5 ]. The ideal goal of heritage tourism is to awaken people’s attention and respect for cultural history and natural landscapes through tourism activities [ 6 ]. Therefore, heritage tourism is the best way to give full play to the functions of natural World Heritage, which can promote scientific research, social supervision and financial support for heritage conservation, and is also a sustainable way for the social and economic development of natural heritage sites [ 7 ]. However, the unreasonable utilization of tourism resources will lead to the imbalance of resource supply and demand [ 8 ]. In its World Heritage Outlook report, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) pointed out that tourism impact has always been in the top three threats [ 9 , 10 , 11 ]. How to coordinate the relationship between World Heritage conservation and tourism development has always been a hot issue of academic and government attention [ 12 , 13 ].

Currently, international organizations and scholars have carried out a series of fruitful studies, covering the impact of tourism activities on heritage conservation, community residents’ perception of heritage tourism, and changes in the landscape pattern. Among them, the community and tourists are the focus of related research. Natural World Heritage sites are often very fragile. To maintain a certain balance between social ecosystems and natural ecosystems, it is important not only to minimize human disturbance, but also to make tourists aware of the need to protect the OUV and to participate in the conservation and promotion of heritage value [ 14 ]. The sustainability of community livelihoods is the premise of World Heritage conservation, and ecotourism is an important form of enriching the livelihoods of community residents in heritage sites [ 15 ]. Locally-driven responsible and sustainable tourism management in and around World Heritage properties can complement other sources of growth, so as to promote economic diversification between tourism and non-tourism activities. This will strengthen social and economic resilience in a way that also helps protect the OUV of properties [ 16 ]. In addition, some scholars have also paid attention to the impact of tourism activities on the biodiversity [ 17 ], water [ 18 ], geology and landform [ 19 , 20 ] of natural World Heritage sites.

Meanwhile, scholars have systematically sorted out and summarized the concept, research methods, authenticity and integrity, heritage management, stakeholders, knowledge systems and development trends of heritage tourism from the theoretical level [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ]. It is worth noting that the research on tourism and conservation of natural World Heritage is a field in which natural ecosystems and social ecosystems are highly intertwined, involving tourism, aesthetics, geomorphology, ecology, geography and other disciplines. There are research bottlenecks in terms of theory, method, technology, model and so on. The existing articles indicate that the studies on the conservation and tourism of natural World Heritage start from the theoretical perspective, and most of them are macro-heritage studies, rarely distinguishing between cultural heritage and natural heritage. The research methods are mainly based on questionnaire survey and interview with tourists and community residents, lacking the application of experimental monitoring methods. The comprehensive understanding of related research has not been fully formed in the academic circles.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of natural heritage protection and tourism since the World Heritage Convention came into being half a century ago, we reviewed the relevant research progress of theories, methods, technologies and models from the perspective of the systematic chain from theoretical understanding to practical application, and proposed future research directions based on the research progress. The theory about natural World Heritage conservation and tourism is the understanding of objective things and their laws, and the related theory research will help us understand the law of this study field. The generation and development of the methods depends on our theoretical understanding of related researches. Through the analysis of the methods, it will help to promote our theoretical understanding, and also better guide us to use technical means to improve the heritage protection and tourism sustainability in natural sites. Conducting the analysis of related technologies can effectively promote us to adjust the methods of recognizing natural World Heritage conservation and tourism in practice, thus promoting the development of theory. Meanwhile, technology is a practical means to accelerate the promotion of heritage protection and sustainable tourism. The analysis of related models in this study is the summary of different development paths and practical experiences, reflecting the development models of natural sites in different scenarios. It is expected to provide references for more natural World Heritage sites in the cooperation between heritage protection and tourism.

Materials and methods

The acquisition of journal papers was conducted based on the available databases including Web of Science (WOS) ( https://www.webofscience.com ) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) ( https://www.cnki.net/ ). To obtain higher quality and more representative articles, we restricted the databases of paper sources during retrieval. In WOS, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) were taken as the retrieval databases. In CNKI, Science Citation Index (SCI), the Engineering Index (EI), Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI), Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) source journals were taken as retrieval databases. Acknowledging that the literature on both heritage conservation and tourism in natural World Heritage sites is sparse and our desire to get a wider review, we also included different synonyms. The search item was “them”. The first search terms was set as “natural heritage”, the second search term was set as “tourism”, and the third terms were set as “conservation” or “protection” or “preservation”. The deadline set for our retrieval was December 31, 2022 (Fig.  1 ).

The process of the literature search and screening

Firstly, based on the search conditions above, 610 and 144 articles were found in WOS and CNKI, respectively. Then, we set two inclusion criteria: (1) the research them must include both heritage tourism and conservation; (2) the research object must be natural World Heritage site(s) or mixed site(s). Articles without heritage protection or heritage tourism are discarded. Researches about cultural World Heritage, built heritage, intangible cultural heritage, national parks, geoparks, natural reserves or other contents without natural World Heritage are also considered irrelevant and excluded. We decide whether an article meets our inclusion criteria by reading the title, abstract, keywords, and even the full text of the article. After screening based on our inclusion criteria and deduplication, 115 and 85 related articles were obtained from WOS and CNKI, respectively. In term of languages, the final obtained articles include Chinese (85 articles), Croatian (1 articles), English (101 articles), Portuguese (2 articles), Russian (1 articles), Spanish (9 articles), Ukrainian (1 articles).

It is worth noting that the number of search results and the final screening results varied greatly, especially in WOS. This may be because when subject is used as the search term in WOS, any one or more of the titles, abstracts, author keywords and keywords plus contain natural, heritage, conservation or protection or preservation and tourism articles will be retrieved. As a result, there are some documents that are not related to the research topic, such as cultural heritage, protected areas, national parks, natural resources, in the search results.

Research progress

The theoretical research on natural heritage protection and tourism has gone through a process from emphasizing heritage value protection to pursuing synergy between heritage conservation and tourism development.

The theoretical exploration of World Heritage protection started from Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention (Operational Guidelines). It states that cultural properties must meet the conditions of authenticity, and all properties nominated for inscription on the World Heritage List shall satisfy the conditions of integrity [ 1 ]. But some scholars believe that the two principles of authenticity and integrity should not be separated and both natural properties and cultural properties should meet these two principles [ 26 ]. Since the number of natural properties is much higher than that of cultural properties, related researches on two principles are mostly focused on cultural properties, while little on natural properties. As an important tool for conservation of properties and then enhance their integrity, as well as create linkages between properties and the wider area that surrounds them [ 27 ], buffer zones are also a vital theory to analysis the relationship between heritage protection and sustainable development [ 28 ].

With the advancement of researches, scholars have gradually realized that the value display and community development are important ways for the sustainable protection and management of world heritage [ 29 ]. Heritage corridor is the product of the joint development and interaction of American greenway movement, scenic road construction and regional heritage conservation concepts [ 30 ]. This theory takes into account the balance of linear heritage protection, community economic development and natural ecosystems. It is suitable for linear heritage such as the Silk Road, but not for nonlinear heritage. To explore the synergy theory of heritage protection and tourism applicable to a wider range, scholars have carried out research from different perspectives such as natural ecosystems, tourists, and community residents. Moreover, as one of the core theories of tourism geography, tourism man-land relationship theory focuses on the interaction between human tourism activities and geographical environment[ 31 ]. It is also an important guiding ideology for the study of sustainable development of natural heritage[ 32 ]. Wen [ 33 ] proposed to use ecological theory and experience economy theory to stimulate tourists’ cognition of heritage value, thereby promoting the coordinated development of protection and tourism in karst world natural heritage sites. In addition, the introduction of symbiosis theory [ 34 ], sustainable livelihood framework [ 35 ], life cycle assessment theory [ 36 ] and other theories have further enriched researches on world heritage conservation and sustainable tourism.

Based on the data sources, the main research methods used in researches on natural world heritage conservation and tourism can be divided into three categories: investigation research methods, indirect research methods, and experimental research methods. Among them, investigation research methods refer to methods that get data from questionnaires [ 37 ], interviews [ 38 ], field observations [ 39 ] and other similar ways; indirect research methods refer to methods that get data from websites [ 40 ], articles[ 41 , 42 ], yearbooks [ 43 ], institutions [ 44 ] and other similar ways; experimental research methods refer to methods that get data through computer experiments such as remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) [ 45 ], or ground sample monitoring like sample plot [ 46 ] and online tracer test [ 18 ], or other similar methods. As the most commonly used method for related studies, the first two types of methods are mostly used in humanities research, such as stakeholder attitudes towards heritage conservation and tourism and their influencing factors. The third type of method is mostly used in natural research, such as the impact of heritage tourism on soil, vegetation, and water ecology in heritage sites. Table 1 shows some representative specific methods, data sources, core content and references of these methods.

The vast majority of relevant studies obtain data through questionnaires and interviews with stakeholders such as tourists and residents, as well as in-direct data from websites, reports, institutions and so on. Few scholars obtain data through monitoring experiments or geographic information technology in natural heritage sites. Long-term experimental monitoring research is even more blank. No studies have been found that combined experimental monitoring methods with questionnaire interviews or geographic information technology. This brings great difficulty to the collaborative research and management of natural heritage tourism and protection.

Investigation and research methods used in related researches include in-depth interviews and fieldwork, landscape sensitivity assessment, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), Delphi method, structural equation modelling (SEM), travel cost method, contingent valuation method, perception survey, open-ended interviews, principal component analysis (PCA), system dynamics model, what is not there (WINT) analysis and convergent parallel mixed method. The advantages of these methods are: (1) quantitative analysis of each element can enhance the persuasiveness of the analysis results; (2) it is helpful to find potential relationships between different variables through model analysis; (3) access to deep insights and emotional reflections. The disadvantages are: (1) bias in interpretation of results by investigators and respondents; (2) the acquired data is highly subjective, especially in questionnaires and interviews. These methods are suitable for researches on attitudes, willingness and choices of stakeholders, such as local community and visitors.

Indirect research methods used in related researches include SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, carbon footprint, literature review and expert interview, AHP, fuzzy mathematical methods, official evaluations analysis, panel data analysis, propensity score matching, static model of tourism environment capacity, grounded theory, literature review and website analysis. The advantages of these methods are: (1) simple and easy to operate; (2) easy to obtain the required data; (3) low research cost. But the data of these methods often face problems of poor data correlation, poor timeliness and low reliability. These methods are suitable for theoretical analysis researches and researches with low requirements on data timeliness and resolution.

Experimental study methods used in related researches mainly include two categories: geographic information technology and experimental monitoring. Specifically, these methods contain remote sensing, GIS, global static partial equilibrium model, landscape pattern index, high-resolution online tracer test, and investigation method of sample plot. Geographic information technology can quickly obtain spatiotemporal data of large-scale study areas, which is suitable for monitoring and research of natural heritage sites. But it needs to be combined with ground monitoring survey data to increase the precision of its analysis results. The results obtained by the ground monitoring method are the most objective and accurate among all methods, but usually require higher professional knowledge of operators, and are time-consuming and costly.

Technologies

Compared with cultural World Heritage sites, natural properties are often more difficult to display and manage, with large area and complex natural and man-made influencing factors. The introduction of 3S technology (remote sensing, geography information systems, global positioning systems), 3D laser scanning technology, virtual reality (VR) technology, augmented reality (AR) technology, holographic projection technology, computer digital technology and other modern technical means is conductive to the digital construction, post-disaster landscape restoration and ecological restoration, and efficient manage of natural World Heritage sites.

Spatial information technology with 3S technology as the core has become the main technical means of current resource and environmental investigation and analysis [ 78 ]. The conservation and tourism researches on aesthetic value (criterion vii) and geological and landform value (criterion viii) conservation and tourism of natural World Heritage sites mostly use this technology. Zhou et al. [ 79 ] revealed the relationship between the tourism development process and the landscape pattern of the natural property based on multi-period remote sensing images. Xiao et al. [ 80 ] carried out an evaluation of the impact of tourism project construction on the aesthetic value of heritage landscapes based on GIS perspective analysis. Furthermore, remote sensing images are also widely used to measure and interpret the changes of the geological hazards area and the scale of disaster[ 81 ], as well as vegetation' reconstruction [ 82 , 83 ]. The use of 3S technology can effectively monitor the changes in the ecological environment, and is an important technical means for the conservation of natural properties. Researches using this method are relatively mature, but most of them focuses on the ecological change of a single property and the impacts analysis of infrastructure construction, urbanization and other human activities. There are few coupling studies on tourism and heritage ecological changes, and the horizontal comparative study between heritage sites is still blank.

3D laser scanning technology has the characteristics of fast scanning speed, strong initiative, high precision and low cost, which provides a new technical means for cave measurement [ 84 ]. Zhou et al. [ 85 ] discussed the morphological characteristics and control factors of Miao Chamber, which was included on the World Heritage Tentative List of China in 2019, based on terrestrial laser. Using 3D laser scanning technology to carry out cave measurement and imaging, mapping and analysis can effectively promote the popularization of the scientific value of cave heritage sites and the improvement of tourism quality.

Through technical means such as VR, AR and holographic projection technology, tourism products and tourism experiences can be extended to the field of virtual tourism [ 86 ], and the interactive experience of heritage tourism can be enhanced. In addition, the application of computer digitization technology has further promoted the efficient management of heritage tourism. Shilin Karst strengthens the informatization of geological heritage conservation and tourism management through the construction of smart platforms such as video surveillance, call center system, and GIS system [ 87 ]. Chen [ 88 ] built the tourism management system of the natural World Heritage site based on ASP.NET, WWW information service site technology, Browser/Server model, and SQL database system. Digital construction and smart tourism under the premise of protecting heritage value are the general trend of heritage tourism development and an effective management model.

Based on different research perspectives, scholars have proposed the ecological popular science tourism development model, the community participation tourism model, the ecological compensation model, the World Heritage-buffer zone-peripheral area coordinated protection model and other collaborative model of natural World Heritage conservation and tourism.

Wen [ 33 ] constructed an ecological popular science tourism development model based on the landscape spatial structure and morphological characteristics of the natural World Heritage site from the perspective of tourists. This model not only emphasizes the realization and acquisition of ecological popular science tourism, but also focuses on the management of various elements of the tourism, so as to facilitate its continuous development, rather than being limited to the existing ecological popular science tourism activities. But the specific implementation paths of this model still need further study.

Yang [ 89 ] proposed the natural heritage protection model of “feeding farmers through travel” from the perspective of the community. This type of model can effectively improve the income, conservation willingness, sense of belonging and education level of community residents, and is applicable to all World Heritage sites. However, in practice, this model often has problems such as lack of participation in decision-making, economic benefit distribution that is out of sync with the economic development of heritage sites, and the lack of effective guarantees for economic participation [ 90 ].

To solve these problems, Duan and Li [ 73 ] proposed to use the ecological compensation model to coordinate the protection of heritage values and the protection of indigenous interests. Their research method is to use the global static partial equilibrium model of Costanza et al. [ 91 ] to obtain landscape change information by interpreting remote sensing images, and to assess the ecological assets and depletion of natural ecosystems. On this basis, Fu [ 92 ] proposed a multi-ecological compensation mechanism for karst natural heritage sites by combining interviews with community residents and questionnaires on tourists, taking into account the interests of all stakeholders.

The conservation of World Heritage is inextricably linked to its buffer zone and wider peripheral areas, especially in karst-type natural World Heritage Sites. Due to the special above-ground-underground dual structure and complex hydrological system of the karst areas, the coordination and protection of the buffer zone and its surrounding areas is crucial to the sustainable development of the karst sites. Xiong et al. [ 93 ] constructed the World Heritage-buffer zone-peripheral area coordinated protection model (Table 2 ). This model organically combines World Heritage conservation, the prevention and control of rocky desertification with the development of surrounding communities, and promotes the sustainable development of natural World Heritage sites in karst areas.

Future research directions

Systematically explore the conservation methods and theories based on world heritage criteria.

Aiming at the problem of fragmented analysis and problem-oriented research in the studies of World Heritage conservation, it is an urgent need to systematically explore heritage conservation methods and theories based on World Heritage criteria. The World Heritage Budapest Declaration adopted by the World Heritage Committee in 2002 pointed out that an appropriate and reasonable balance should be sought between heritage conservation, sustainability and development [ 94 ]. Scholars’ understanding of World Heritage conservation and tourism has gone through three stages: conflict theory, reconciliation theory and synergy theory [ 95 ]. However, due to the huge disparity in the number of cultural heritage sites and natural heritage sites, scholars’ research on heritage conservation mostly focuses on cultural heritage, and less on natural heritage. Most of the related studies are fragmented analysis or problem-oriented research, or regard natural properties just as a special study area like other protected areas, with little characteristics of the World Heritage. The systematic theories and methods for heritage conservation has not yet formed. With the increasing number of world heritage sites and the trend of human and natural life community, researches on the theories and methods based on World Heritage criteria and classified conservation of heritage values are imminent.

Formulate corresponding conservation systems and ecological restoration standards for different types of properties

Aiming at the problem of unclear objects of heritage protection and restoration degree of World Heritage, the protection systems and ecological restoration standards of different World Heritage types need to be discussed. Since the birth of World Heritage Convention in 1972, World Heritage has a history of fifty years. However, what exactly are the World Heritage site to protect, how to protect them, and to what extent to restore the damage that has occurred, how to restore? These problems still plague scholars and heritage managers in actual researches and conservation management practices. UNESCO World Heritage Center and scholars agree that the core element of World Heritage is OUV, which includes three aspects: satisfying World Heritage criteria, authenticity/integrity, and protection and management. We must protect the carrier that embodies the OUV of World Heritage sites. But what elements are contained in each World Heritage criterion or the OUV carrier of each type of World Heritage has become a broad issue that has not been discussed. Scholars tend to study the protection of things that can be seen and felt in the short term, such as water quality, vegetation coverage and vegetation types, species diversity, protection of buildings and rock paintings, post-earthquake recovery, cave microorganisms and so on. Little attention has been paid to things whose changes can only be perceived over a long period of geological history, such as the preservation of landform values. In addition, the extent to which OUV should be protected and restored after being destroyed are also unclear, which hinders the researches on heritage conservation and the effectiveness of practice in solving practical problems.

Give full play to the complementary advantages of various research methods and reveal the mutual feedback mechanism between tourism and heritage conservation

The main research methods used in related researches are investigation research methods, indirect research methods, and experimental study methods. Related researches mostly use the first two types of methods. The vast majority of relevant studies obtain data through questionnaires and interviews with stakeholders such as tourists and residents. However, natural World Heritage sites are protected areas dominated by natural ecosystems, and the importance of experimental study methods, such as experimental monitoring and geographic information technology, in the mutual feedback research on heritage value conservation and tourism cannot be ignored. While these methods are rarely used in current research. Long-term series of experimental monitoring studies or studies that combine these types of methods are even more blank. Each kind of method has its own advantages and disadvantages. In future researches, the three kinds of methods should be combined, together with the heritage database constructed by long-term experimental monitoring, to deeply analyze the mutual feedback mechanism between heritage conservation and tourism.

Develop ecological restoration technology based on biodiversity restoration

In response to the problem of land degradation around the natural properties, ecological corridors need to be built through species diversity restoration to expand the benign outward influence of heritage ecology. There are many land degradation phenomena around natural World Heritage sites. On the one hand, due to the requirements for protection and management attributes when applying for the title of World Heritage, areas with better natural environment are often included in the scope of World Heritage when the boundary is delimited. While the buffer zone and its surrounding ecological environment are poor or disturbed by human activities. On the other hand, due to the requirements of the World Heritage Convention on the protection and management, environmental protection in World Heritage sites is generally given great attention, while the ecological environment of the buffer zone is often neglected, weakening the buffering effect of the buffer zones. Unreasonable tourism activities, infrastructure construction and urbanization in the buffer zones have accelerated the pace of land degradation. Vegetation is the most basic part of a terrestrial ecosystem, and all other organisms depend on it [ 96 ]. Species diversity is the manifestation of biodiversity at the species level, which can represent the structural complexity of biological communities, and reflects the structure type, organization level, development stage, degree of stability and habitat level of the community [ 97 , 98 ]. It is one of the key contents for future research to develop a series of ecological restoration technologies based on biodiversity restoration. It can be realized by building the radial ecological corridor connecting the World Heritage sites, buffer zones and their periphery, and driving the restoration of species diversity through vegetation restoration, so as to expand the benign ecological environment of the properties to wider periphery.

Build ecological compensation development models based on the perspective of heritage tourism and value realization of world heritage

Most of the World Heritage sites are important tourist attractions due to their high-grade tourism resources and outstanding scientific value. However, how to achieve these outstanding values has not yet been answered. In addition, stakeholders have different impacts on the ecological environment due to different ways of participating in tourism. Different travel models and behaviors of tourists, and different ways of providing tourism-related services (such as homestays, picking, hiking, rafting) will have different contribution values to the ecological degradation of tourist destinations. Ecological compensation can enhance the conservation awareness and protection behavior of tourism stakeholders, thereby promoting ecological protection and ecological restoration. As one of the effective ways to balance social benefits, economic benefits and environmental benefits, it has been widely valued by scholars and managers since it was proposed [ 99 ]. In the past, scholars have studied the ecological compensation mechanism, impact factors, and compensation methods of forest resources, wetland resources, grassland resources and so on. Some scholars paid attention to ecological compensation from the perspective of community residents and farmers' livelihoods. However, few attentions have been paid to targeted ecological compensation studies in natural World Heritage sites [ 100 , 101 ]. Thus, aiming at the problem of ecological degradation caused by the unbalanced distribution of benefits from tourism and unclear paths to realize the heritage values, researches on ecological compensation mechanism based on tourism perspective and value realization path of World Heritage are needed.

Conclusions

This literature review summarized the research progress of natural world heritage conservation and tourism from the perspectives of theory, method, technology and model, and proposed future research directions.

Our findings indicate that the UNESCO World Heritage Center and IUCN are the main force of the theory research, and put forward important theories such as authenticity, integrity, buffer zone, and sustainable tourism of heritage sites. Scholars have also introduced heritage corridor theory, ecological theory, experience economy theory, actor network theory, symmetry theory, sustainable livelihood framework, life cycle assessment theory, carbon footprint and so on into related researches from the perspective of social science. In future researches, we should pay more attention to the particularity of world heritage, and focus on theoretical and methodological research based on different world heritage value standards.

We also found that the vast majority of current research uses social science research methods, especially questionnaires and in-depth interviews. In addition, mathematical modeling methods are also common methods in related research. Only a few scholars use experimental monitoring or geographic information technology methods to carry out research from the perspective of natural science. No studies have been found that combine these types of methods. In future research, attention should be paid to the combination of long-term experimental monitoring data of natural heritage sites with social science and geographic information technology to build a natural heritage monitoring database to promote in-depth research and scientific management of natural heritage.

In terms of technology, scholars have used modern technical means including 3S technology, 3D laser scanning technology, virtual reality technology, augmented reality technology, holographic projection technology, and computer digital technology to promote the digital construction, smart tourism and post-disaster landscape restoration and ecological restoration in heritage sites. In future researches, ecological restoration technologies based on biodiversity restoration should also be paid attention to. And radial ecological corridors should be constructed to connect properties, buffer zones and their periphery, so as to expand the benign ecological environment of the natural properties to the buffer zones and wider peripheral areas.

Regarding the coordinated model of natural world heritage conservation and tourism, scholars have proposed models such as ecological popular science tourism development, community participation in heritage tourism, ecological compensation, and coordinated protection of property, buffer zone and peripheral areas. The core starting points are stakeholders' participation in heritage tourism, distribution of heritage tourism income and heritage zoning.

Furthermore, we put forward the following research prospects: (1) systematically explore the conservation methods and theories based on world heritage criteria; (2) formulate corresponding conservation systems and ecological restoration standards for different types of world heritage; (3) give full play to the complementary advantages of various research methods and reveal the mutual feedback mechanism between tourism and heritage conservation; (4) develop ecological restoration technology based on biodiversity restoration, establish radial ecological corridor, and expand the benign ecological environment of the properties to wider periphery; (5) build ecological compensation development models based on the perspective of heritage tourism and value realization of world heritage.

However, this study still has some limitations. Firstly, the research theme of world natural heritage protection and tourism involves the interdisciplinary integration of ecology, environmental science, tourism and other disciplines. Although we used some synonyms to cover more publications in this field, the retrieval results may still be incomplete due to the complexity and limitations of literature database and search methods. The search results of related articles in this study are subject to uncertainty but have little influence on the exploration of research progress and future research directions of natural World Heritage conservation and tourism in terms of the overall direction of research development. Monographs, newspapers, patents, technical reports and other types of literature, as well as articles in other literature databases may further clarify our findings. Finally, there is a certain degree of subjectivity in articles inclusion and subject analysis.

Availability of data and materials

The data presented in this study are openly available in [China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI)] at [ https://www.cnki.net/ ] and Web of Science (WOS) at [ https://www.webofscience.com ].

Abbreviations

Web of Science

China National Knowledge Infrastructure

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Outstanding Universal Value

International Union for Conservation of Nature

Science Citation Index Expanded

Social Sciences Citation Index

Emerging Sources Citation Index

Science Citation Index

The Engineering Index

Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index

Chinese Science Citation Database

Remote Sensing

Geographic Information System

Analytic hierarchy process

Structural equation modelling

Principal component analysis

What is not there

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats

China Entrepreneur Investment Club

National aeronautics and space administration

Remote sensing, geography information systems, global positioning systems

Three Dimensions

Virtual reality

Augmented reality

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Guizhou normal university. We would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful and productive comments on the manuscript.

This research was funded by the Philosophy and Social Science Planning Key Project of Guizhou Province (Grant No. 21GZZB43), the Key Project of Science and Technology Program of Guizhou Province (Grant No. 5411 2017 Qiankehe Pingtai Rencai) and the China Overseas Expertise Introduction Program for Discipline Innovation (Grant No. D17016).

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All authors are contributed to the manuscript. Conceptualization, ZZ and XK; methodology, ZZ; validation, ZZ; formal analysis, ZZ; data curation, ZZ; writing—original draft preparation, ZZ; writing—review and editing, ZZ, XK and HD; visualization, ZZ and HD; project administration, XK; funding acquisition, XK. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Zhang, Z., Xiong, K. & Huang, D. Natural world heritage conservation and tourism: a review. Herit Sci 11 , 55 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-023-00896-6

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Intangible cultural heritage research in China from the perspective of intellectual property rights based on bibliometrics and knowledge mapping

• Weijun Hu 1 ,
• Mingxing Li 2 ,
• Xiaomeng Chi 3 ,
• Xinxing Wang 2 &
• Asad Ullah Khan 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  825 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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This research scrutinizes the trends and dynamics of Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in China, utilizing a dataset of 91 papers from the CNKI database spanning 2011 to 2020. The study uses CiteSpace software to visualise and analyse the literature across multiple dimensions, including article count, authorship, institutional affiliations, and keyword co-occurrence. Findings indicate a lack of robust collaboration among authors and institutions in IPP and ICH, with a scarcity of active cooperative groups. Critical research hotspots identified encompass intangible cultural heritage, intellectual property protection, inheritors, legal protection, copyright, intellectual property law, and geographical indications, with the legal safeguarding of ICH’s intellectual property, digital conservation, traditional cultural expressions, and original authentication emerging as the leading research frontiers. This investigation provides a holistic view of China’s IPP and ICH landscape, offering essential scientific insights for ongoing scholarly discourse. This study mainly benefits policymakers and stakeholders in the cultural heritage sector, underscoring the necessity of enhanced authorial and institutional collaboration and the prioritization of legal and digital protection mechanisms to safeguard China’s intangible cultural legacy for posterity. The analysis is critical, informing policy formulation and strategic planning to bolster ICH’s protection and sustainable management in China.

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Introduction.

Intangible cultural heritage is a valuable cultural information resource of human society, carrying the Chinese nation’s civilization and unique spiritual values. Recognizing its significance, protecting, transmitting, and developing ICH has become a priority for the state and ethnic groups. In 2003, the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage was established by the UNESCO General Conference, aiming to preserve ICH represented by traditions, oral expressions, festive rituals, handicraft skills, music, dance, and other heritage. Numerous scholars have studied ICH’s preservation and development. Tan et al. ( 2018 ) examined the elements of the “people-place bond” that may contribute to the sustainability of ICH and found that a “sense of loss”, “sense of justice”, and “sense of mission” emerged as the three main themes of the “people-place bond”. Similarly, Lonardi et al. ( 2020 ) highlighted the significance of ICH, particularly language, in sustainable tourism research. Chen et al. ( 2020 ) proposed a framework for experiential landscapes of ICH that takes a multidimensional view of the “landscape”. Moreover, York et al. ( 2021 ) pointed out that the socio-cultural adjustment brought about by working in ICH tourism enterprises positively influenced migrant workers’ local identity.

At the same time, the IPP of ICH has become an increasing concern for both national and international parties. In 2019, China’s State Council issued the “2019 Promotion Plan for Accelerating the Implementation of the National Intellectual Property Strategy to Build a Strong Intellectual Property State” (the “Promotion Plan”), which aimed to promote the implementation of the national intellectual property strategy and emphasized the importance of ICH IPP. Later, in August 2021, the State Council released Opinions on Further Strengthening the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage (the 2021 Opinions). The plan highlights using various means, such as trademark rights, patent rights, and geographical indications, to reinforce ICH IPP and outline an in-depth intellectual property strategy for ICH protection.

Intellectual property protection of intangible cultural heritage refers to protecting ICH by incorporating it into intellectual property rights (Peng, 2021 ). To explore the hotspots and development trends in the field of research on ICH in the context of IPP in China and to give an overview of the overall development of this field, this paper analyzes the literature in much research on IPP of ICH in China based on the relevant literature in the Chinese database CNKI through a combination of bibliometric and knowledge mapping analysis.

Literature review

Studying Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) under the lens of Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) has emerged as a crucial academic endeavour. This paper conducts a systematic literature review on the intricate relationship between IPP and ICH, guided by bibliometric analysis and knowledge mapping. The literature was selected based on stringent criteria: relevance to IPP and ICH, citation impact, and contributions to the theoretical and conceptual framework of the field. This review aims to trace the academic trajectory, identify pivotal works, and synthesize core themes and debates.

Research on the intellectual property protection of intangible cultural heritage

Problems of intellectual property protection of intangible cultural heritage.

While the IPP of ICH significantly impacts its safeguarding, transmission, and revitalization globally, many practical issues remain unresolved. Wagner and de Clippele ( 2023 ) contended that globally, the protection of ICH has evolved from rescue and salvage efforts to comprehensive safeguarding and, finally, to achieving sufficient protection. However, the IPP system has private rights and exclusive properties that contradict the collective and public interest nature of ICH, leading to the “tragedy of the commons” and “anti-tragedy of the commons” in the practice of ICH protection (Chen and Yang, 2021 ). The current intellectual property rights system has significant limitations in protecting traditional crafts, and its revision regarding these crafts needs to be more scientific and feasible (Yan and Li, 2021 ). Moreover, knowledge in the public domain is at risk of damage if it is not more widely protected from privatization (Raath and VerhoefI, 2021 ). A quantitative analysis of 12,123 ICH trademark search data in China found that ICH symbol trademarking was disorderly, and many trademark applications could distort, derogate, or dilute the ICH’s connotations (Luo and Wang, 2021 ).

The legal framework for the Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) encounters numerous obstacles. Specifically, concerning traditional medicine, the current intellectual property regulations exhibit notable delays and tend to prioritize administrative safeguarding measures, resulting in the inability of existing IPP laws to provide legal protection for all forms of ICH (Nan, 2023 ). Additionally, there needs to be more special legislation and target provisions for ICH’s IPP, and the scope, rights, obligations, and duration of ownership of the subjects of ICH have yet to be clearly defined (Gao et al. 2017 ). There is a necessity for a more precise delineation of the legal characteristics of folk paper-cutting art in China, alongside strengthening the legal acknowledgement of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) within society (Zhang, 2023 ). China’s intellectual property-related legislation started late, and the financial investment in folk paper-cutting needs to be increased. Further, although the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage calls for international cooperation in safeguarding the world’s intangible heritage, it inadvertently fosters nationalistic claims of local cultural traditions (Aykan, 2015 ). States Parties can use the Convention as a patent ratification system and its list to register common traditions as their national heritage. The current international protection of ICH favours a government-led administrative public law approach to safety, and international negotiations on IPP for ICH have needed to be faster (Wang and Huang, 2021 ). There are problems of “free-riding,” distortion and falsification, uneven protection, lack of justice in distribution, and high transaction costs in the security and utilization of ICH (Xiao, 2019 ). The safety and utilization of ICH resources and the distortion and falsification of ICH by external users of ICH heritage should be taken seriously and solved.

Measures for the intellectual property protection of intangible cultural heritage

Given the considerable challenges surrounding the intellectual property protection (IPP) of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), scholars have researched and proposed potential solutions. One such approach is the “Classified policy and joint protection” model for constructing an IPP system for ICH heritage (Wang and Huang, 2021 ). This model entails government leadership in defining the boundary between public and original ICH achievements and using platforms and data to protect ICH heritage innovation achievements through legal means such as patents and copyrights. Creating a supportive environment for preserving and developing time-honoured ICH techniques is also essential, as is respecting local customs during the ICH IPP process for traditional folklore.

Reducing the registration criteria for geographical indications of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is crucial for safeguarding ICH and enhancing its quality benchmarks (Arfini et al. 2019 ). This involves reducing related fees, clarifying ICH geographical indication owners and rights holders, and ensuring product quality standards. A new system must be designed, outlining rights subject and object, content limitations, and automatic protection authorization (Yan and Li, 2021 ). Furthermore, when selecting the geographical indication path for ICH, natural and human factors related to ICH products, geographical distribution inheritance, product quality characteristics, and prior rights, as well as the promotion and protection plan for geographical indication products, must be considered and tailored on a case-by-case basis (Campi and Dueñas, 2019 ). For example, some researchers studied the IPP of Miao embroidery and proposed that Miao embroidery should be protected for an indefinite period, defining folk organizations among the Miao people as the subjects of Miao embroidery rights and establishing a royalty system to ensure that Miao embroidery creators can profit from users (Luo, 2022 ).

Building an intellectual property protection system fully integrated with marketization is crucial for promoting traditional ethnic handicrafts while ensuring their inheritance and protection. This system must rely on modern intellectual property protection and leading enterprises to maximize its effectiveness. A special rights system for modernizing and developing traditional crafts should also be considered to ensure that conventional ethnic arts are preserved and developed effectively (Wang, 2022 ). In addition, to promote international cooperation and competition in intellectual property rights, countries along the “Belt and Road” should deepen and promote collaboration based on a joint interest base. Through the consensus of establishing a community of human destiny and implementing new TRIPS-plus rules as a practical strategy, “Chinese wisdom” and “Chinese solutions” should be applied to improve the protection of intangible cultural heritage on a global scale (Wang and Huang, 2021 ).

In terms of legislation on intellectual property rights protection of ICH, Reves ( 2023 ) suggests that the protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in intellectual property rights legislation should incorporate the use of criminal law, including the establishment of a dedicated section within the criminal code and the definition of specific offences related to the loss of ICH. Nan ( 2023 ) advocates for creating specialised legislation to protect intellectual property rights in traditional medicine. This entails enhancing the current legal framework for conventional medicine’s intellectual property rights protection, developing a unique legal safeguarding mechanism, and establishing a comprehensive database of traditional medicine knowledge. Tan and Cao ( 2018 ) highlighted the importance of constructing an intellectual property rights system for ICH in ethnic minority regions designed to meet the needs of the socialist legal framework with Chinese characteristics while also focusing on the innovation of intellectual property rights law for ICH. To protect ICH in Tibet, Xiao ( 2019 ) proposed a hybrid management mechanism of “public law-soft private law” constructed by the ICH Law, the internal norms of traditional communities, and the Copyright Law. Similarly, Lin and Lian ( 2018 ) recommended strengthening copyright, trademark, geographical protection, and patent protection to deal with the diversity and complexity of ICH and reconcile the various interests involved. As far as trademark management of ICH symbols is concerned, trademark grabbing by outsiders and scattered registration by indigenous people, as well as orderly use of ICH symbols under collective trademarks or certification trademarks, should be excluded, which should be identified as the primary goal of ICH trademark law protection. To achieve this goal, the “exclusion method plus uniform use” scheme shall be adopted in practice. Under this scheme, First Nations, trademark offices, courts, and ICH protection centres need to cooperate to improve trademark law protection of ICH through advocacy, action, institutions, and information (Luo and Wang, 2021 ).

At a macro level, the legal protection of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage must support the economic development of the country concerned based on its resources (Hilty, 2009 ). In the modern era, it is essential to not only enhance ICH digital preservation techniques but also to reflect on the cultural values and ethics that ICH embodies (Chen and Yang, 2021 ). To further bolster ICH development in China, efforts must be made to improve the protection path of the United Nations Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. Additionally, local legislation and normative documents should be promulgated and integrated with specificity and operability based on the Law of the People’s Republic of China on ICH to strengthen the legal system for ICH protection (Chen and Luo, 2022 ).

Visual analysis of iIntangible cultural heritage research

In recent years, scholars in China have used CiteSpace visualization and measurement software to research ICH, with significant findings. While some studies have focused on ICH as a whole, others have explored specific types of ICH, such as drum lyrics and Sichuan opera, or ICH in different regions, such as ethnic minority regions. Ducharme et al. ( 2024 ) stated that ICH research needed a more robust cooperative network between authors and academic institutions, underscoring the need to strengthen such collaborations to enhance educational influence. Chen and Huang ( 2020 ) discovered that research on ICH in China had undergone three stages, including slow start, rapid growth, and steady-state development, and that the scope of study involved many fields, such as tourism economy, fine arts, and music. Fan and Wang ( 2022 ) identified cultural industries, cultural inheritance, legal protection, and tourism development as key research domains in the field of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). They observed a low citation rate of foreign journals within this discipline. Zhang et al. ( 2024 ) emphasized the importance of increased collaboration among researchers and institutions in ICH studies. They further pointed out the field’s emphasis on theoretical analysis, advocating for an expansion into more applied research to enhance practical applications.

From the communication studies perspective, Chen et al. ( 2022 ) explored the research clustering of ‘ICH communication’ in China since 2007. He proposed that research on ICH from the communication perspective mainly consisted of two discourse systems: reflections and discussions on ICH’s essential characteristics and cultural attributes and problem strategy research on the protection, inheritance, and development of ICH. In the future, new media communication will play a crucial role in preserving the living heritage of ICH, and the “digital communication of ICH” will become an important research topic in the field. A lot of research was conducted on the ICH of ethinc minorities in China. The annual distribution of literature advanced wave-like, and the overall trend of publications had declined (Liu, 2021 ). While research hotspots in this area continue to deepen, there is still a need to expand into new research areas in theoretical ICH research of China’s ethnic minorities. In the field of drumming research, Li and Hu ( 2018 ) employed scientometrics theory to analyze drumming research literature between 1956 and 2016 and pointed out future directions for research, including a systematic study on the origin and flow of drums and research on the association and interaction between drumming and other music and art disciplines.

In terms of research on the digitization of ICH, Zhao ( 2013 ) found that the focus of the study had been on the digitization process of cultural heritage and its technological excavation, while issues related to remote visualization of networks and intelligent services for the public had not been studied enough. Fan et al. ( 2021 ) analyzed the theoretical construction and knowledge storage of knowledge graphs regarding the digital protection of ICH knowledge. They employed knowledge graph-related technologies to display different types of ICH in each region and constructed a regional ICH knowledge base platform. Shi et al. ( 2018 ) constructed a topic map of ICH digital resources and visualized it, indicating that topic map technology could help visualize the relationship between topics and provide visual navigation for users.

In terms of Chinese agricultural and cultural heritage, Cui and Shang ( 2020 ) the field is dominated by qualitative research and case studies and pointed out that primary national strategic needs should guide future scholars’ research. When it comes to ICH in theater, researchers have proposed using the essential event technique to study the dynamic evolution of Gaozai opera, which reflects the initial formation and inheritance development of the art form (Chen and Xu, 2015 ). Zhao and Tian ( 2021 ) conducted a quantitative and qualitative visual analysis of the current state of Sichuan opera communication and found that research on Sichuan opera has been gaining momentum over time. There are now many hotspots for research, including various forms of Sichuan opera communication, Sichuan opera works, and Sichuan opera artists. However, challenges such as limited cooperation among different regions and institutions and fragmented cooperation among scholars still exist. Li and Wu ( 2021 ) emphasized that Tibetan opera research is interdisciplinary, covering history, art, and communication. They found that 11 major categories, including Tibetan opera and Princess Wencheng, have been formed, and Tibetan opera, Intangible Cultural Heritage, and cultural heritage are research hotspots. However, there is a lack of research on Tibetan opera digital preservation, and inter-institutional cooperation is limited (Xu et al. 2021 ).

In sports and martial arts, Yang et al. ( 2021 ), research patterns have evolved from conceptual definitions, conservation, and development studies before 2014 to case studies focused on specific regions and sports. Sports ICH embodies a unique folkloric characteristic in each region, spatially dispersed. In another study, Cao and Lin ( 2020 ), Chinese martial arts have gained considerable attention in the international academic community, with research primarily focused on exercise science and neuroscience. They found that the engineering model was the primary approach to promote research in this field.

There are relatively few CiteSpace-based ICH research results in international academia. Dang et al. ( 2021 ) pointed out that digitization of ICH is indispensable for preservation and transmission, and combining ICH and cultural industries is a crucial approach for utilisation and dissemination. Meanwhile, Su et al. ( 2019 ) used CiteSpace to analyze ICH-related literature and discovered limited academic collaboration among researchers, research institutions, and countries conducting ICH research. The relationship between highly productive and highly cited authors was also weak.

Further, Robbins ( 2010 ) proposed new directions for technological innovation in ICH: direct documentation of indigenous traditions, the transformation of indigenous traditions into emerging technologies and contemporary cultural expressions, and the development of new technologies applying indigenous practices. Cozzani et al. ( 2016 ) argued that the European Community-funded project - “Treasures” had made a precious and innovative contribution to the preservation and transmission of ICH and that these projects are practical tools for organizations, schools, and institutions to promote endangered ICH. Alivizatou ( 2008 ) claimed that the concept of ICH had greatly enriched the cultural heritage discourse, leading to a more inclusive and human-centred understanding of past concepts and that the museum sector had the potential to benefit from this new approach. Rodzi et al. ( 2013 ) argued that cultural heritage sites and cultural tourism had a high potential to attract tourists and that ICH could only be sustainable if it were consciously and equally protected. Finally, Perkins and Krause ( 2018 ) argue that environmental conditions affected ICH.

The analysis above indicates a gradual increase in academics focusing on ICH from the perspective of intellectual property rights and visualization. Both qualitative and quantitative studies have yielded fruitful research results, providing valuable references for scholars studying this field. The intersection of ICH and intellectual property has become increasingly important. Moreover, CiteSpace has been applied to visual analysis in a broad range of subject areas, including environmental scanning (Robinson et al. 2021 ), intelligent libraries (Du et al. 2021 ), low-temperature electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries (Hu et al. 2022 ), hotel management (Li et al. 2017 ), molecular mechanisms of cancer (Zhong et al. 2021 ), advanced tourism (Pestana et al. 2020 ), mechanical energy harvesting (Azam et al. 2021 ), and barrier-free tourism (Qiao et al. 2021 ). For example, Zhong et al. ( 2021 ) identified hot research mechanisms, such as metabolism (aerobic glycolysis, insulin resistance, actin), oxidative stress, gene expression, and apoptosis, in studying the effects of exercise on cancer. Wei et al. ( 2022 ) identified the inflammatory and immune mechanisms, related diseases, and related cytokines as the primary research topics in atherosclerosis (AS), with research frontiers in B cells, mortality, inhibition rates, and monocytes. It can be seen that CiteSpace is used in an extensive range of research fields, such as sociology and engineering. Knowledge graphs can generate a traceable knowledge graph from disorganized data through visualization techniques and provide a reasonable and sufficient basis for relevant research.

In summary, the literature on systematic analysis and prediction of the future of research in the field of IPP of ICH is limited. There is also a need for more literature on the characteristics and development trends in this field using visualization methods. Therefore, it is an innovative and valuable attempt to study the current situation of the IPP of ICH through econometrics and to analyze the state of past research more precisely. The Promotion Plan has explicit provisions for the IPP of ICH and supports local research in this area. Against the State’s strong endorsement of IPP of ICH, the need for in-depth study on the inheritance, revitalization, and utilization of ICH has become a significant issue in academic and practical circles in China. What is the status of research in this field in the last decade? What are the hot topics and trends? Who are the foremost scholars and research institutions studying this field? To promote research in this field, it is essential to answer these questions and better understand the current state, core research themes, and development trends. Therefore, this paper collects relevant literature on ICH and intellectual property in the Chinese database CNKI and uses CiteSpace software to visualize and analyze the field of ICH intellectual property to reveal the research hotspots, research frontiers, and development trends in this field.

Data sources and research methods

Data sources.

To conduct an in-depth study on the intellectual property protection (IPP) of China’s intangible cultural heritage (ICH), this research has selected China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) as the primary data source. The choice of CNKI is due to its comprehensive coverage of academic research in China, encompassing a wealth of resources such as journal articles and dissertations, which significantly meet the analytical needs of this study. Compared to other databases, CNKI emphasises Chinese literature, which is crucial for investigating the domestic phenomenon of ICH IPP. This study specifically selected literature from the Peking University Core Database and Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI) to ensure reliance on high-quality research. The time frame for the study was set from 2011 to 2020, with the aim of exploring the research progress and development trends in the field of ICH IPP over the past decade.

In terms of literature selection criteria, a search strategy was initially established. A secondary search was conducted after a preliminary search of the topic words to identify keywords closely related to the theme. In this study, the keywords related to intellectual property protection included “Intellectual Property Protection”, and those related to intangible cultural heritage included “Intangible Cultural Heritage”. Based on these keywords, an initial search expression was formed: TS= (Intellectual Property Protection) AND (Intangible Cultural Heritage), facilitating the literature search. Additionally, this research focused on including journal articles with high citation rates and academic influence while excluding non-academic articles and duplicate studies. Detailed information on the specific languages, types of literature, time frame, and search results are provided in Table 1 .

Furthermore, to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the research data, the retrieved samples were imported into CiteSpace for deduplication. Upon verification, it was confirmed that there were no duplicate articles in the sample, ensuring the uniqueness and accuracy of the data. This curated and verified set of samples will be used for an in-depth visual research analysis in this field.

Research methodology

The use of CiteSpace software for bibliometric analysis is due to its proficiency in visualizing academic collaboration networks and research trends. Integrating features of bibliometrics, databases, and information science, CiteSpace can create knowledge maps that depict the development status and research trends of various disciplines over different periods. These maps unveil the evolution of fields and current research frontiers, highlighting CiteSpace’s ability not only to forecast future developments in a domain but also to explore the logical relationships between works of literature, expressing these relationships through graphical representations (Chen, 2006 ; Chen et al. 2010 ). The knowledge evolution visual model provided by CiteSpace approximates the scientific development of specific physical world domains. Its high level of abstraction forms a “second-order science” category, offering more vivid visual effects that facilitate the interpretation of existing scientific discoveries and the establishment of literature-based scientific findings (Chen et al. 2015 ).

In this study, CiteSpace V5.7.R3 was employed to conduct a visual analysis of 91 papers in the field of intellectual property protection and intangible cultural heritage, encompassing an analysis of the basic overview of the field (distribution of countries/regions, co-cited journals, co-cited authors, institutional co-occurrence, and keyword clustering) as well as an examination of research hotspots and the overall research evolution. The temporal segment was set from January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2020, with a time slice of one year. The version of CiteSpace used, V5.7.R3, is known for its efficient processing of large data sets and the generation of detailed knowledge maps, which are invaluable for understanding the state and mechanisms of scientific development. This methodology aims to comprehensively reveal the developmental trends and research hotspots in Chinese ICH studies, particularly from the intellectual property rights perspective. This enriched and expanded analysis is crucial for articulating a nuanced understanding of the field’s trajectory and current research emphases, thus contributing significantly to the scholarly discourse on ICH and IPP.

Results and analysis

Analysis of the total number of publications.

Over the past decade, the annual distribution of literature on the Intellectual Property Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage (IPP of ICH) has served as a barometer for measuring China’s research interest and academic engagement in this field (La et al. 2021 ). As depicted in Fig. 1 , between 2011 and 2020, the overall trajectory of ICH IPP publications has declined, delineating two distinct phases. In the initial phase from 2011 to 2015, despite a decreasing annual output, the number of publications each year remained above ten, with the first two years witnessing relatively high outputs of 16 and 14 articles, respectively. This phase coincided with China’s intensified national strategy to strengthen the protection and utilization of intangible cultural heritage, aligning with global efforts to recognize and safeguard these heritages.

The number of published papers from 2011 to 2020.

However, during the declining phase from 2016 to 2020, with the year 2020 marking a low with only two published articles, a critical inquiry arises into the factors influencing this downturn. Several potential explanations merit exploration. The reduction in output could be associated with shifts in research focus, changes in policy, or the maturation of the field where foundational research questions have been extensively addressed, prompting a need for innovative methodologies and approaches. Therefore, while this study delineates the decadal trajectory of IPP literature in intangible cultural heritage, reflecting tangible research advancements, it is evident that both the quantity and quality of academic output could greatly benefit from enhanced scrutiny. Through this analysis, we posit that the impending academic endeavours in the IPP of ICH will integrate innovative theoretical propositions and methodological breakthroughs, fostering a revival in this critical research domain.

Analysis of the authors of literature

Firstly, utilizing CiteSpace V5.7.R3 software, we constructed the co-authorship visualization map (Fig. 2 ) and the co-authorship clustering view (Fig. 3 ) for the field of intellectual property protection and intangible cultural heritage research. These views reveal the collaborative patterns among scholars in this domain, where the co-authorship network elucidates the cooperative relationships between researchers, and the number of publications reflects the individual scholars’ contributions and engagement in the field. Upon delving into the author collaboration trends, Table 2 showcases the publication frequency of individual authors. This study identifies Chen Yuxi as the most prolific author, highlighting a prominent collaboration pattern. Similarly, the consistent, collaborative relationship between Wang Shuting, Xiong Wanzhen, and Sun Zhiguo indicates a stable research collective. However, a broader author collaboration network, predominantly characterized by single-article contributions, unveils a different, possibly nascent, research community.

CiteSpace-based author collaboration mapping.

CiteSpace-based author collaboration clustering mapping.

Further refinement in Fig. 3 showcases the collaborative clusters derived from the extensive cooperation network, revealing ten distinct research groups marked with “#”. These groups reflect the diversity and specialization within the research field, covering varied thematic directions and scopes ranging from developing heritage products to sports heritage, intellectual property of traditional medicine, and studies on folk arts. This prevailing pattern of individual research and sparse collaborative networks unveils key characteristics of intellectual property protection within the Chinese intangible cultural heritage academic ecosystem. While individual scholars’ contributions have brought diverse research perspectives and insights, the absence of a tightly-knit research collaboration network indicates that the synergistic effects of cooperation may not have been fully realized. This further suggests an urgent need to bolster interdisciplinary exchanges and collaboration to enhance the depth, robustness, and impact of research in the intellectual property of intangible cultural heritage.

Analysis of literature publishing institutions

Institutions are crucial in producing research results. The research institutions and their publication volume reflect the current situation and development trend of IPP of ICH research power in China. From the perspective of institutional cooperation density, it can be seen from Fig. 4 that the nodes in the figure are research institutions, the number of nodes is 111, the node linkage is 31, and the node density is 0.0051. The node linkages signify institutional cooperation in this field, with connection strength proportional to the inter-institutional collaboration level. Institutions are somewhat scattered and less connected, highlighting a need for more cooperation among institutions in IPP or ICH research in China, requiring further academic exchanges. Table 3 indicates that most publications originate from university faculties and research institutes. Specifically, most publications are from university law schools, colleges of the arts, history, management, resources, and environmental sciences, among others. The extensive involvement of universities and research institutes is evident in the IPP of ICH research. The School of Law of South-Central MinZu University and the Research and Creation Division of Guangxi Arts Institute have published the most articles, with three articles each. However, most research institutions issued only one article. Hence, institutions need to conduct more in-depth research on ICH’s IPP. Geographically, institutions with more articles are mainly located in Hubei Province, Sichuan Province, Beijing City, Chongqing City, and other regions. This indicates a positive correlation between research in the field and the level of regional economic and social development. However, the overall research strength of institutions in IPP of ICH is relatively weak, with fewer articles being issued. There needs to be more academic exchanges and cooperation among institutions, and research strength needs to be strengthened. The main research forces in this field are universities’ law schools. A region’s economic and social development of an area is directly proportional to the degree of development of a research field.

CiteSpace-based mapping of institutional collaboration.

Analysis of research hotspots

To identify research hotspots and development trends in the subject area, a knowledge mapping analysis of keywords was conducted using CiteSpace software to analyze data related to the IPP of ICH. The lines between nodes represent the co-occurrence of keywords. The larger the node circle, the higher the frequency of the node keyword appearing and the closer the relationship between the term and its co-occurring keywords. In Fig. 5 , the number of nodes is 149, links are 357, and network density is 0.0324, indicating a relatively compact network structure. The two largest nodes are “intangible cultural heritage” and “intellectual property”, reflecting their high frequency of appearance compared to other keywords (Table 4 ). From these two keywords, other high-frequency keywords such as “intellectual property protection”, “legal protection”, “copyright”, and “intellectual property law” were derived. These high-frequency keywords are significant nodes in the study of the IPP of ICH. In the past decade, they have also been the research hotspots for ICH’s IPP. Meanwhile, in CiteSpace, nodes with intermediary centrality higher than 0.1 are key nodes. In Fig. 5 , nodes such as “intellectual property” (the centrality of 0.55) and “intellectual property protection” (the centrality of 0.18) are key nodes, indicating that the state and academics are paying more attention to the protection of the intellectual property of ICH, and conducting follow-up studies on this issue.

CiteSpace-based keyword co-occurrence mapping.

Secondly, the frequency of keywords reflects the distribution and focus of a subject area, which is conducive to grasping the development trend of research in this area. The frequency of keywords in Table 4 shows that “intangible cultural heritage” and “intellectual property” appear most frequently, 73 times and 56 times, respectively. “Intellectual property protection” was mentioned nine times, and “legal protection” was mentioned seven times. “copyright” and “intellectual property law” appear 4 times, while “local legislation” and “ethnic minorities” appear 3 times. The high occurrence of these keywords signifies research hotspots, indicating growing attention toward the combination of ICH and intellectual property in the academic community. At present, practical circles have adopted intellectual property-related legislation to protect ICH vigorously. Local legislation is increasing. Furthermore, the research community has shown interest in the protection of ICH in minority communities, with ICH in such regions serving as a research hotspot. This focus can help strengthen ICH preservation among these groups.

To more intuitively demonstrate the correlation between keywords in the IPP of ICH in China, this paper uses CiteSpace to conduct a clustering analysis of keywords, aiming to reflect the closeness between nodes. Cluster labels are named after keywords with larger arithmetic values; the smaller the number of cluster labels, the more keywords are included in the clusters. Each cluster consists of a series of keywords with strong correlations in the mapping. Different clusters represent different research directions within a subject area. The clustering module value (Q value) and the clustering mean profile value (S value) in CiteSpace can be used to judge mapping effectiveness. It is generally considered that a Q value > 0.3 means that the clustering structure is significant, an S value > 0.5 indicates that the clustering is reasonable, and an S value > 0.7 means that the clustering is convincing. From the clustering results of keywords in Fig. 6 , it can be seen that Q value = 0.5306 and S value = 0.794. Therefore, the clustering of IPP of ICH research is significant and convincing. As can be seen in Fig. 6 , there are seven clusters, namely, “intellectual property”, “intellectual property protection”, “geographical indications”, “protection mode”, “copyright”, and “problem-oriented”. This indicates in-depth research into ICH protection in China under intellectual property rights. The smaller the number in the clustering labels, the more closely related keywords are included in the clusters. It is also evident from Fig. 6 that intellectual property is a hot spot in the current research field of IPP at ICH.

CiteSpace-based keyword clustering mapping.

Analysis of research frontiers and evolution

The time zone mapping of keywords provides valuable insights into the evolution and trends of IPP of ICH research from 2011 to 2020. The mapping shows the connections between keywords and reflects the research frontiers in the field. Research advances reveal new trends and mutational characteristics of a subject area. Figure 7 shows that intangible cultural heritage, geographical indications, intellectual property rights, legal protection models, and bearers have been the research hotspots in the field. The line between the keywords in the time zone map indicates that these hot keywords appeared in different years of literature and journals. New research hotspots emerged in different years, such as “local art, private rights protection, public goods, and sports culture” in 2013. In 2015, there were hotspots such as “traditional medicine, rights system, misconceptions about intangible cultural heritage protection, and protection of productive areas”. 2019 new research hotspots emerged, such as “judicial protection, excellent traditional culture, cultural and creative products, and criminal law protection”. The changes in research hotspots for these keywords reflect the evolutionary path of research on IPP of ICH, from initial research on the combination of intellectual property and ICH to research on the combination of intellectual property and specific ICH items to legal application of intellectual property of ICH. Finally, as research in this field continues to grow, the scope of research has expanded. For example, IPP has been extended to numerous kinds of ICH, from indigenous art to folk music, traditional medicine, folk paper-cutting art to fine arts. There are four main research frontiers in this field today: legal protection of intellectual property of ICH, digital protection, traditional cultural expressions, and original certification. Obviously, the research scope and research content of IPP of ICH have been expanded, but the depth of its research needs to be further promoted.

CiteSpace-based timeline mapping.

Conclusions and recommendations

This paper, leveraging bibliometrics and knowledge mapping through CiteSpace software, critically examined the landscape of Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in China. By dissecting 91 documents over the past decade, this study illuminated the research trends, collaboration patterns, and institutional contributions within this niche yet vital academic terrain.

Conclusions

Firstly, the analysis revealed a decremental trend in the annual publication volume, highlighting a research plateau in the IPP of the ICH domain. The initial phase (2011–2015) demonstrated robust engagement, aligning with national strategies for ICH preservation. However, a noticeable decline post-2015 raises concerns about diminishing research vigour. This downturn, possibly due to shifts in academic focus or policy changes, underscores the imperative for rejuvenated scholarly attention.

Secondly, a fragmented scholarly network was evident, with minimal collaborative endeavours among researchers, as showcased by the predominant single-article authorships. This scenario indicates a lacuna in multi-disciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations, essential for nurturing a holistic research ecosystem. Research concentration within certain law schools and regional institutions suggests a potential disparity between research intensities across different geographical and academic precincts.

Thirdly, the institutional analysis underscored a scant interconnectivity among entities engaged in IPP of ICH research. Predominantly anchored in law schools, the research landscape portrays a need for a broader engagement spanning various academic disciplines. The regional distribution of research output, correlating positively with economic and social development indicators, calls for strategic resource allocation and academic support enhancement, especially in underrepresented areas.

Finally, the shift in research hotspots, from general ICH preservation to nuanced aspects like legal frameworks, copyright, and geographical indications, reflects an evolving academic discourse. The current emphasis on legal protection, digital safeguarding, and traditional cultural expressions signifies a maturing research domain, albeit requiring deeper, more innovative explorations.

Recommendations for future research

Fostering multidisciplinary and international partnerships will be crucial to cultivating a vibrant academic environment. Enhancing research methodologies and diversifying analytical tools will enrich the scholarly narrative. Policy-makers and academic institutions must prioritize funding and support mechanisms to invigorate research in underexplored themes and regions.

As China progresses in its ICH protection journey, aligning with global intellectual property norms, a strategic fusion of public law mechanisms and private intellectual property rights is essential. The burgeoning awareness and legislative advancements in ICH protection herald a promising trajectory for future research, wherein an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach could unlock novel insights and sustainable heritage conservation strategies.

In conclusion, this study delineates a critical juncture in China’s ICH research landscape, marked by a call for strategic interventions and collaborative synergies to harness the full spectrum of intellectual property rights in safeguarding the cultural tapestry. Future scholarly endeavours should pivot towards an integrated, dynamic, and inclusive research paradigm that resonates with the evolving global discourse on intangible cultural heritage.

Limitations of the study

While this bibliometric analysis offers insights into the IPP of the ICH landscape, it is imperative to acknowledge the inherent limitations of such an approach. Reliance on published literature might not fully capture the extensive on-ground activities and nuanced cultural dialogues within the ICH spectrum. Furthermore, the methodological constraints and potential biases in data selection and analysis necessitate a cautious interpretation of the findings.

Data availability

The dataset used in this study can be reproduced by following the method described in our manuscript. The dataset and associated files can be made available upon reasonable request or accessed with the permission of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). Dataset: Contains all the primary data used in the study. Associated Files: These include supplementary materials, scripts, and other relevant documents necessary for data analysis and the reproduction of the results. These files encompass all information needed to verify and replicate the study’s findings, ensuring transparency and reproducibility in the research process. Access to these materials can be granted upon reasonable request, adhering to the permissions set by CNKI.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Key Research Base of Universities in Jiangsu Province for Philosophy and Social Science “Research Center for Green Development and Environmental Governance”. This work was supported by The Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project (grant number 20YJCZH064), The Postgraduate Education Reform Project of Jiangsu Province (grant number JGKT22\_C091), Jilin Provincial Social Science Foundation Project "Ecological Design of Cultural Landscape of Archaeological Sites" (No. 2022B180), and Philosophy and Social Science Research Innovation Team Project in Jilin University (No.2022CXTD17).

Jilin Provincial Social Science Foundation Project “Ecological Design of Cultural Landscape of Archaeological Sites” (No. 2022B180) and Philosophy and Social Science Research Innovation Team Project in Jilin University (No.2022CXTD17).

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Weijun Hu, Mingxing Li, Xiaomeng Chi, Xinxing Wang, and Asad Ullah Khan conceived the study, collected the data, performed data analysis, and wrote the manuscript, with Mingxing Li and Asad Ullah Khan leading the study supervision. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript. These authors contributed equally to this work.

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Hu, W., Li, M., Chi, X. et al. Intangible cultural heritage research in China from the perspective of intellectual property rights based on bibliometrics and knowledge mapping. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 825 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03314-9

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03314-9

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Exploring the spatiotemporal dynamics and simulating heritage corridors for sustainable development of industrial heritage in foshan city, china.

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Yao, L.; Gao, C.; Zhuang, Y.; Yang, H.; Wang, X. Exploring the Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Simulating Heritage Corridors for Sustainable Development of Industrial Heritage in Foshan City, China. Sustainability 2024 , 16 , 5605. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16135605

Yao L, Gao C, Zhuang Y, Yang H, Wang X. Exploring the Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Simulating Heritage Corridors for Sustainable Development of Industrial Heritage in Foshan City, China. Sustainability . 2024; 16(13):5605. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16135605

Yao, Linghan, Chao Gao, Yingnan Zhuang, Hongye Yang, and Xiaoyi Wang. 2024. "Exploring the Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Simulating Heritage Corridors for Sustainable Development of Industrial Heritage in Foshan City, China" Sustainability 16, no. 13: 5605. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16135605

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