admin Xining – There has been showing a building prosperity on the one of the world’s last remote places Tibetan plateau. Mountains with waving prayer flags are newly topped with expansive steel power lines and at night the illuminated signs of Sinopec gas stations glows over newly built highways.
To discuss China’s plans to create a unified system with clear standards for limiting development and protecting ecosystems, policymakers and scientists from China, the United States and other countries assembled in Xining in August, which is capital of the country’s Qinghai province.
China representative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Zhu Chunquan, and Switzerland-based scientific group, records that the country’s economy has boomed over the past 40 years, but priorities are now expanding to include conserving the country’s key natural resources.
“It’s quite urgent as soon as possible to identify the places, the ecosystems and other natural features” to protect, Zhu says.
Among other goals, China aims to build its own Yellowstone on the Tibetan plateau.
Zhu serves on an advisory committee providing input on the development of China’s embryonic national park system, expected to be officially revealed in 2020. Chinese officials have also visited U.S. national parks, including Yellowstone and Yosemite, and sought input from varied organizations, including the Chicago-based Paulson Institute and the Nature Conservancy.
In Qinghai, a vast region in western China abutting Tibet, one of the first pilot parks will be developed. The area also is home to such iconic and threatened species as the snow leopard and Chinese mountain cat, and encompasses the headwaters of three of Asia’s great waterways: the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong rivers.
“This is one of the most special regions in China, in the world,” says Lu Zhi, a Peking University conservation biologist who has worked in Qinghai for two decades.
While construction continues at a frenzied pace elsewhere on the Tibetan plateau, the government has already stopped issuing mining and hydropower permits in this region.
Yellowstone is widely considered the world’s first national park. After it was created in 1872, the U.S. government forced the Native Americans who lived in the area to re-settle outside the park boundaries, in keeping with 19th century notions of wilderness protection. But countries that establish park systems in the 21st century now must consider how best to include local populations in their planning.
The first parks to be formally incorporated into China’s national park system will showcase the country’s vast and varied landscapes and ecosystems: from the granite and sandstone cliffs of Wuyishan in eastern China to the lush forests of southwestern Sichuan province — home to giant pandas — to the boreal forests of northeastern China, where endangered Siberian tigers roam.
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