Strengthening China's national biodiversity strategy to attain an ecological civilization

Abstract

Biodiversity conservation is essential for realizing China's new vision of an ecological civilization. China has been implementing numerous massive ecological sustainability and protected area (ES&PA) programs across the entire country. These programs have greatly restored degraded ecological environments, improved provisions of critical ecosystem services and increased rural livelihoods. However, despite the general improvements in environmental quality, the trend of rapid biodiversity loss has not been significantly reduced. We found that most of the current ES&PA programs lack explicit biodiversity goals, and thus have limited contributions to the conservation of biodiversity. Given the limited resources available for and huge investments associated with these programs, achieving greater biodiversity gains under them is the most cost‐effective way to conserve biodiversity. We recommend six strategies for strengthening the country's biodiversity conservation, that is, strengthening biodiversity in ES&PA programs, PAs as the core, integrating biodiversity and ecosystem services, delivering effective monitoring, broad inclusiveness of stakeholders and mainstreaming biodiversity. These strategies also highlight China's priorities for achieving significant progresses toward the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, and should be important options for developing China's post‐2020 biodiversity framework.

The biodiversity benefit of native forests and mixed‐species plantations over monoculture plantations

“…Nowhere is this more true than in China, which combines a high level of native biodiversity (Tao, Huang, Jin, & Guo, ) with a large human population that is increasing its ecological footprint (Liu & Diamond, ; Pyne, ; Sayer & Sun, ; Xie et al, ). Moreover, for decades, China has had the managerial, political and financial capacity to implement the largest land‐sustainability programmes ever seen, from nature‐reserve protection to reforestation to de‐desertification (Bryan et al, ; Liu et al, ; Wu et al, ; Xu, Wang, & Xue, ). These programmes have caused major land use changes and successfully slowed land degradation caused by economic activities (Liu et al, ; Ouyang et al, ; Ren et al, ).…”

“…However, relative to their scale and budgets, little is known about the biodiversity consequences of China's land‐sustainability programmes, even though an important and expected co‐benefit is biodiversity conservation (Wu et al, ). In a recent, massive review, Bryan et al () were able to cite only one study on the consequences of China's large‐scale reforestation programmes for biodiversity, Hua et al ().…”

Measuring protected-area outcomes with leech iDNA: large-scale quantification of vertebrate biodiversity in Ailaoshan nature reserve

“…China has to date also placed 15% (1.43 million km 2 ) of its land surface into nature reserves [5,6]. Moreover, Wu et al [7] have shown that, at least in western China, the reserve system covers most ecoregions, biodiversity priority areas, and natural vegetation types (goal B), and Ren et al [8] have used time-series analyses of Landsat imagery to show that China's national-level nature reserves successfully prevent deforestation (goal E). China has therefore already demonstrated some considerable institutional capacity for achieving Aichi Target 11.…”

“…In southern and eastern China, however, the ecological representativeness of reserves is low (goal B) [9], many reserves are isolated (goal C) [7], there is little information on the impact of the reserves on local human populations (goal D) and, most importantly, we know little about whether the reserves are effective at protecting the species that live inside them (goal E). Our focus in this study is thus goal E, reserve effectiveness, because if reserves fail to protect their biodiversity endowments, the other goals do not matter [2,3,[10][11][12].…”

Are river protected areas sufficient for fish conservation? Implications from large-scale hydroacoustic surveys in the middle reach of the Yangtze River

“…The ranges and boundaries of the reserves were determined after considering the integrity and suitability of the protected resources as well as the needs of the local economy, the production activities, and the everyday lives of the residents in the area [43, 44]. However, nature reserves and germplasm resource reserves that regard freshwater fishes as the main object of protection are less common and have been less studied in China [36, 45]. Considering its importance in the Yangtze River ecosystem, the MRYR was selected to evaluate the effects of these types of reserves.…”