Great Rivers Partnership - China - A Blueprint for Conservation

Building a Case for Protection

Developing a blueprint for the conservation of China's most important ecological areas

The first step in protecting China’s ecological hotspots is identifying where they exist. The Chinese government asked the Conservancy to take the lead in a large-scale study to identify the lands and waters critical to conserving the country’s diversity of life.

The pilot project will assess the upper Yangtze River basin, where much work is taking place. The 250-million-acre area includes parts of eight provinces and is home to more than 150 million people. Downstream, another 270 million Chinese depend on the Yangtze and its tributaries for life-sustaining water.

This process then will be replicated throughout China, resulting in a blueprint of the places the country needs to protect and a set of conservation strategies. The conservation blueprint process, as scientists call it, will be the first comprehensive and systematic assessment of plants and animals in the nation’s history. It will span six major ecological regions, from Northern forests to marine habitats, and include contributions from hundreds of scientists and experts.

Because economic development is driving many of the Yangtze region’s changes, the assessment also will evaluate what scientists call ecosystem services. These are things the environment produces for free, such as clean air and timber, but that have great value to people and economies.

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Qi Ye, director of the Conservancy’s national-level initiatives in Beijing.