On Wednesday, which was the ninth World Wetlands Day, nine
additional wetlands were designated reserves of international
importance, known as Ramsar wetlands.
"China's Ramsar wetland sites have increased to 30. They cover
3.43 million hectares and make up 9.4 percent of the country's
natural wetland area," said Zhou Shengxian, head of the State
Forestry Administration (SFA) at a World Wetlands Day meeting.
Eight of the nine new Ramsar wetlands, located in western
China's Qinghai
Province, Yunnan
Province and Tibet
Autonomous Region, are high-altitude marshes and lakes, where
the ecosystem is extremely fragile, said Zhou.
The other one, Shuangtai Estuary on the Liaohe River in the
northeastern province of Liaoning,
is the largest high-altitude reed bed in the country, he said.
China became party to the Ramsar Convention in 1992, vowing to
take part in coordinated international action to protect wetlands.
The first seven areas were added to the List of Wetlands of
International Importance in the same year.
The SFA has set up a Ramsar Convention Implementing Office to
take charge of promoting international cooperation in this
regard.
All nine wetlands, especially those on the Qinghai-Tibet
plateau, are headwaters of major rivers, such as the Yangtze,
Yellow, Lancang and Yarlung Zangbo rivers, and they are not only
the "water tower" for China, but also for Asia, said Lei Guangchun,
senior advisor at the Asia-Pacific affairs office of the
Switzerland-based Convention on Wetlands.
"Their ecology influences more than 10 billion people's lives in
the middle and lower reaches of the rivers," acknowledged Lei.
"Becoming a member of the Ramsar Convention will help the
administrators of the wetlands share experience and technologies on
wetland protection with other countries and secure more funding,"
said Lei.
Wetlands, whose natural ecological systems often referred to as
the earth's 'kidneys,' play a crucial role in water conservation
and the prevention of erosion and flooding.
China presently has 66 million hectares of wetlands, accounting
for one-tenth of the world's total. The government has established
353 wetland natural reserves with a combined area of 16 million
hectares, covering 40 percent of the country's natural wetlands,
according the Ramsar Convention Implementing Office under SFA.
Over the last few decades, however, their area has been
shrinking, especially in recent years, noted Lei. This is due to
blind exploitation and overuse of wetland biological resources.
To solve this, there should be more effort on repairing wetlands
which have suffered destruction, special laws to protect them and
greater awareness, especially among government officials, of their
importance, said James Harkness, chief representative of the World
Wild Fund for Nature in China, which assisted in the designation of
the new Ramsar sites.
(Xinhua News Agency February 3, 2005)
