The First International Conference on Geoparks was recently held in Beijing. Eight Chinese geoparks, including Anhui's Huang Mountain, Jiangxi's Lu Mountain, Henan's Yuntai Mountain, Yunnan's Stone Forest, Guangdong's Danxia Mountain, Hunan's Zhangjiajie, Heilongjiang's Five Linked Lakes and Henan's Song Mountain, were included in the first group of 25 geological parks in the world.

UNESCO created a Geopark label in Paris in February 1999, with the intention of favoring projects integrating geological site preservation and endogenous development.

The Geopark project comes in the wake of the 1991 International Declaration of the Rights of the Memory of the Earth which said that "now is the time for us to learn to protect and learn about the past of the Earth, to read this book written before our advent: that is our geological heritage."