The report was written at the 2015 UNESCO Chair Program on Cultural Heritage and Disaster Risk Management, International Training Course at Ritsumeikan University Kyoto during the sessions on 16th September 2015, led by Professor Peter Head, Chief Executive of The Ecological Sequestration Trust.

It focuses on ecology and sustainability of historic urban areas, and disaster mitigation and integrated planning of historic cities.

ICOMOS proposes guidelines for integrating culture with socially and economically inclusive sustainable urban development. Such an approach would integrate culture with urban planning, tourism development, infrastructure development, poverty alleviation, affordable housing, disaster risk reduction, and conservation of tangible and intangible heritage.

This guidance would also propose tools for assessing the way that conservation could be implemented in a city at the local level. It also aims to improve evaluation methods for comparing the multidimensional impacts coming from integrated conservation towards an “integrated cultural heritage impact assessment.”