Restoring Wetlands

By WANG HAIRONG

Restoring Wetlands

By WANG HAIRONG

FERTILE LAND: The Qixing River Wetland in Heilongjiang Province was recently named a wetland of international importance at the Sixth Asian Wetland Symposium held in Wuxi City, east China’s Jiangsu Province, on October 13

In northeastern Heilongjiang Province, wetland conservation makes progress amid difficulties

Watching flocks of waterfowl taking off and landing in the large expanse of wetland near his home is a favorite pastime of Li Qiwen, a middle-aged primary school teacher in Weichang Township, Luobei County in Heilongjiang Province.

The wetland is home to hundreds of species of birds, including rare white storks and red-crowned cranes, as well as more common geese and ducks.

The picturesque wetland near Li’s hometown comprises a large part of the Sanjiang Plain, a low-lying plain strewn with marshes. The plain is one of China’s major wetland regions.

Wetlands have been found to play a role in mitigating climate change. Researches show that wetlands all over the world sequestrate as much as one third of global carbon emissions.

At the Sixth Asian Wetland Symposium held in Wuxi City, east China’s Jiangsu Province, on October 13, participants adopted of the Wuxi Declaration, in which they called for intensified efforts to ensure the conservation and wise use of wetlands.

At the symposium’s opening ceremony, Anada Tiega, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention, announced that four more wetlands in China had been classified as wetlands of international importance, bringing the total number of Chinese wetlands on the Ramsar list to 41.

The Ramsar Convention, an international treaty on wetland conservation and sustainable utilization, signed in February 1971 in Ramsar, Iran, went into force in 1975. China ratified the convention in 1992.

Three of the four wetlands, the Zhenbao Island, the Qixing River and the Nanweng River are in Heilongjiang Province. Now, with seven wetlands of international importance, Heilongjiang is the Chinese province with the most wetlands of international importance.

From reclamation to restoration

“China has a total of 38.48 million hectares of wetlands, the largest area in Asia,”said Yan Chenggao, Director of Wetland Management Center of the State Forestry Administration. Wetlands account for 3.77 percent of China’s total landmass.

Since the 1950s the demand for land from a large population, rapid economic growth and a lack of understanding regarding the profound ecological value of wetlands led to extensive and irrational reclamation. More than 50 percent of China’s wetlands were destroyed between 1950 and 2000.

Recently, as the importance of wetlands has been better understood, the Chinese Government has taken major initiatives to conserve wetlands and some previously reclaimed wetlands have been restored.

Official statistics show that China restores more than 10,000 hectares of wetlands each year and 50.3 percent of all the country’s wetlands are currently under protection.

Lying in the northernmost part of China with long and harsh winters, the Sanjiang Plain used to be an almost uninhabited wilderness. The wetland’s black soil, however, is fertile. In the first half of the 20th century, many people migrated to the region and converted local wetlands into farms. The plain became one of China’s major suppliers of corn, soybeans and rice.

Before large scale reclamation in the 1950s, wetlands accounted for more than 80 percent of the Sanjiang Plain, but today the area of wetlands had shrunk by 80 percent, said Liu Xingtu, a researcher with the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Liu said that from 1949 till the 1990s, the Sanjiang Plain has experienced four rounds of land reclamation. In the mid-1990s, the reclamation frenzy also swept the Weichang Wetland near Li’s hometown. Bulldozers, tractors and excavators trundled through the area, turning 80 percent of the wetland into arable fields. The Weichang Economic Development Zone was set up and dozens of buildings grew out of what had once been a pristine ecosystem.

“When migrating birds came back in the spring, they could not find their homes. They hovered in the sky, but could not find a place to settle down. Then they left the wetland,”Li said.

Li was very upset by the destruction he saw and repeatedly wrote to the local government, petitioning officials to stop the exploitation and protect wetlands. He also did his best to impart the importance of wetlands to villagers.

Fortunately, after ratifying the Ramsar Convention in 1992, the Chinese Government gradually scaled up wetland protection and restoration.

In 1998, the Heilongjiang Provincial Government issued a circular ordering an end to wetland reclamation. The document said that in the future, food production would be primarily boosted by increasing the yields of existing fields through advanced farming techniques and better management.

Li wrote to the State Council in 2000 about the development project in his hometown and soon got a reply. Development on the remaining 4,000 hectares of wetland was called off, and the government also invested money in saving the wetland. In 2009, Li won a national award for his efforts to protect wetlands.

“So far, Heilongjiang has set up 73 wetland nature reserves, covering a total area of 4.17 million hectares,” said Cai Binghua, Director of the Heilongjiang Provincial Forestry Bureau. In these reserves, more than 8,000 hectares of wetland have been restored.

The Sanhuanpao Nature Reserve on the Sanjiang Plain was set up in 2002. Since then, a large area of the reserve has been returned to its original wetland state.

“As more water entered the fields, water plants such as reeds and cattails mushroomed, then the fish and birds multiplied,”said Yang Fengying, head of the administrative office of the Sanhuanpao Nature Reserve.

Lu Weifeng, Vice Governor of Heilongjiang, said that in the long run, the ecological value of wetlands outweighs their economic value.

Distribution of Wetlands in China

The natural wetlands in China are unevenly distributed among eight wetland regions.

● The northeastern region of freshwater swamps;

● The northwestern region of saline lakes and swamps in dry climate;

● The southwestern plateau region of sub-alpine lakes;

● The southern and southeastern region of rivers;

● The coastal region of tidal swamps, salt marshes, and mud-lands;

● The middle-lower Yangtze River region of lake groups and river systems;

● The middle-lower Yellow River region of lake groups and river systems;

● The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region of alpine lakes and swamp groups.

(Source: China’s Natural Wetlands: Past Problems, Current Status, and Future Challenges)

A tough battle

Despite the government’s efforts to conserve wetlands, illegal reclamation still continues in some places.

This August, national broadcaster CCTV reported a case in Shilipao Wetland near Heilongjiang’s Tongjiang City. Populated with wild lotuses, ducks and other waterfowl, the wetland is a local scenic spot. But in 2009 about 27 hectares of wetland were converted into farmland.

In addition, a case was investigated in 2008 in Bachadao Nature Reserve near Tongjiang and 20 illegal reclamation cases were investigated in 2004 in the Sanjiang National Nature Reserve, the largest freshwater wetland in China, involving a total of 300 hectares, said CCTV.

Local residents said that recent grain price hikes made farming more profitable, which provided an additional incentive for wetland reclamation.

HE JINGCHEN

“As grain prices soar, farmers are keen to till more land,” said Wang Xuwen, an official in charge of food supply in Tongjiang. Some farmers also make money by subcontracting land to others. Rental for one hectare of rice paddy reportedly reaches 4,000-5,000 yuan ($615-769) a year.

Zhang Fengjiang, an official in Heilongjiang’s Naolihe Nature Reserve, admitted in an interview with theChina Economic Weeklythat stopping farmers from reclaiming wetland is “a very challenging job.”

Every spring, farmers and reserve administrators play a tug of war. Some farmers surreptitiously plow and sow seeds in the wetlands, usually at night. While reserve administrators make efforts to destroy any seedlings they find, farmers often return and sow seeds again and again.

Recently, Zhang’s team seized the vehicles of farmers illegally tiling the wetland, but farmers sued reserve administrators at the local court for illegal property seizure.

In the first-instance ruling, the court said that reserve administrators did not have a legal basis to seize the farmers’ vehicles. The Naolihe Nature Reserve has appealed the ruling and a second-instance ruling is still pending.

Currently, about a dozen Chinese provinces have wetland conservation regulations, yet there is no law on wetland protection. Zhang said that the absence of such a law makes it difficult for reserve administrators to hold perpetrators liable. Moreover, Zhang pointed out that although local residents’development activities were restricted after wetland reserves were set up, they were not properly compensated for their loss.“This has led to hostility and a lack of cooperation on the part of villagers,” he said. In 2010, China began a trial scheme that offered ecological benefit compensation to residents living near wetlands. A state-level fund has been set up for this purpose. Beijing-basedPeople’s Daily Overseas Editionsaid that in 2010 and 2011, the Central Government allocated 400 million yuan ($61.5 million) to the fund.