Today I spent the day in discussion with the Rare China Advisory Group. I spent the morning as a student listening to Professor Kun Tian, one of the country’s top wetlands specialists. He is also deputy director of the newly created National Plateau Wetland Research Center, a national research institute approved by the China State Council to help implement the national wetland conservation plan. Professor Tian is the most articulate and compelling advocate for wetlands conservation I have ever met. His sincere passion is perfectly communicated in English spoken with an authoritative BBC accent.
To its enormous credit, Southwest Forestry University, Rare’s training partner in China, won the competition to house the new Center, and with it several million dollars in funding. Scientists are now being recruited from across China and beyond to staff the new institution. Professor Yang Yuming, former head of TNC’s program in Yunnan and member of the Rare China Advisory Group, has been recalled from TNC to lead the Center.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s at stake: The wetlands of Western China, in the uplands covered by the three plateaus of Mengxin, Qing-Tibet, and Yun-Gui, cover an area of over 100,000 square kilometers. This includes vast lakes in Tibet’s rolling grasslands; the huge Qinghai lake, source of the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong Rivers; Sichuan’s deep peat bogs, a massive store of undecomposed organic material; greenhouse gasses just waiting to be emitted as drainage occurs; and Yunnan’s valley marshes, critical migratory bird feeding sites and centers of global biodiversity significance.
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The Yangtze River
Mass tourism, drainage for grazing and farming, peat mining for fuel, and pollution conspire to imperil many of China’s 550 wetland reserves, including 36 sites recognized as globally significant under the United Nation’s RAMSAR convention. Half of the wetland areas have no protected status.
Our China team and I, together with our partners at the university, The Nature Conservancy and others we met, including WWF China, are convinced that wetlands conservation should be the focus of Rare’s second cohort in China. It’s highly likely we’ll take up their recommendation and begin welcoming applications from partners working on this issue soon. We will explore signing a partnership with Professor Yang Yuming’s center to work together to strengthen Pride training to focus on this issue. This second cohort will launch in late 2009 and start fieldwork in 2010.
I left China as it was preparing for a holiday weekend to celebrate the Moon Festival, similar to our autumn harvest festivals. Professor Yang Yuming and my Rare colleagues, ever the caring family, ensured I traveled back to Bali laden with traditional Chinese moon cakes.
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Chinese moon cakes
These delicious, heavy buns, full of baked, sugary ham, made a great alternative to the dull food offered by Thai Airways, with plenty left over for my two greedy children to enjoy after I arrived home, just like hundreds of millions of Chinese children also did that weekend.
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