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By Charles Bedford
The Conservancy’s China program has long been focused on creating new nature reserves in China and improving existing ones.
China has approximately 2,500 nature reserves, places that are set aside primarily for biodiversity reasons, but many of them are reserves in name only due to the low level of funding available.
Some of the reserves are managed by the national government, some by provinces, and some by municipalities, so there is not much consistency.
Setting the "Gold Standard"
Ideas are in the works to improve the management of these reserves, to have visitor centers, add and train rangers, establish a minimum budget, and enforce regulations. To do this requires focusing on working with the managers of a small subset of 51 model nature reserves to create the gold standard for management that others would then rise toward.
The problem of having "paper parks," or parks in name only, is not unique to China—many of the world's countries have designated parks or protected areas that show up only on maps and not on the ground, lacking adequate enforcement against illegal logging, poaching or other destructive uses.
A Chinese Nature Reserve Up Close
I went along on a visit to Songshan National Nature Reserve, about 70 kilometers north of Beijing.
"Song" means pine, and "Shan" means mountain.
This park is particularly well funded, run by the city of Beijing with capital improvements put in place for the Olympics. Gate receipts are steady, and the city continues to invest in management and will likely develop a second trail in the near future.
The Conservancy worked with Songshan Nature Reserve to complete a conservation area plan—essentially a master plan and evaluation of the threats to the park.
We also helped to design and build their visitor’s center and trail interpretative system, train management staff, and conduct a fire survey to determine the best way to manage occasional wildfires.
My visit was coordinated by Fu Wei, an MBA student from Dartmouth College, who is doing an internship with the Conservancy’s China program to survey the current levels of operational and capital funding of nature reserves in China.
The idea is that this will help us understand what the current baseline level of management is on these reserves and assist in setting a target for a "model" reserve.
Songshan National Nature Reserve
Songshan’s "gateway community," similar to West Yellowstone or Estes Park in the U.S., is pretty simple: a couple of ladies show up with bags of fresh picked fruit to sell to hikers. A side attraction at their store is a couple of butterflies in a plastic water bottle—a bit like taffee stretchers in the fudge shop window.
The reserve is about 12,000 acres and is comprised of a number of very steep granite foothills rising from about 2,000 feet to over 5,000 feet in elevation.
There is a small patch of old growth (older than 200 years) Chinese pine, once common on the hills, but now constrained to only a few hundred acres. We hike up a steep sidewalk for over three miles.
At the end of the trail, we run into a group of twenty-something’s on a medicinal herb gathering expedition—something theoretically not allowed in the reserve but common practice as we have seen from the returning picnickers whose bags have plants and small shovels or trowels sticking out of them.
Back at the headquarters, Fu Wei has finished her interviews.
The infrastructure at this park is something that Conservancy staff here is justifiably very proud of and represents vast improvements from the state of things two years ago.
So the challenge is bringing the other 51 nature reserves up to minimum standards.
Songshan Nature Reserve is a beautiful place—appropriate to its lyrical name—and not unlike the park near my home in Boulder, Colorado. It seems well positioned (as long as the herb harvest doesn't get out of hand!) to sustain itself over time.
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Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Ami Vitale/TNC (Songshan National Nature Reserve); Photo © Ami Vitale/TNC (Hikers explore Songshan); Photo © Ami Vitale/TNC (A bird viewing platform in Songshan).
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