The rich biological diversity of the hotspot is threatened by excessive exploitation of the region's natural resources. Signs of the loss of biodiversity are evident, including forest and ecosystem loss, fragmentation and degradation of habitats, and species population declines. Tigers have not been seen in most of the region since the 1960s and an endemic otter disappeared in the 1970s following heavy logging and drying out of river valleys. A world famous ornamental maple tree was last seen in the wild in 1985. At the same time, forest cover has been reduced from 30 percent to 15 percent while the tributaries of the Yangtze have lost 85 percent of their original old-growth forest cover. Overstocking of goats, horses, sheep and yaks has resulted in severe damage to pastures. Medicinal plants are seriously over-harvested and many are now exceedingly rare in areas of former abundance. Laws against the illegal hunting and trading of endangered species are weakly enforced.
Ecosystem degradation has had significant social and economic impact as well. Each year 800 million tons of soil enters the Yangtze from Chongqing, Sichuan and Yunnan. The disastrous summer floods of 1998, which caused $20 billion in direct economic damages, have been primarily attributed to deforestation and erosion on the upper Yangtze.
The current array of threats to biodiversity in the region is changing rapidly due to dramatic socioeconomic change in China during the past two decades. The following threat analysis, first broken down by direct pressures and then by indirect causes, covers the threats that contribute to biodiversity loss in the region today and in recent history. These threats should be understood as heterogeneous across time and localities, i.e., changing with altitude, ecosystem type, ethnic and cultural factors and policy. Because of limited time and availability of data, the following analysis of threats and their indirect causes remains general and does not distinguish between these factors. It may be necessary to collect additional information for a finer and more in-depth analysis on the threats that affect this region. Accordingly, the range of threats addressed by specific projects seeking CEPF funding must be evaluated through site-specific biological, social, cultural and economic analysis.
Habitat destruction is caused by a wide range of activities that lead to absolute loss of habitat as well as qualitative loss through fragmentation and degradation. Activities with adverse effects on populations of concern include those that cause both reduction in absolute numbers and reduction in the long-term viability of the species. The threats listed below follow a ranking on their relative degree of impact in general. However, it is also important to point out that 1) these threats are dynamic with the time and heterogeneous spatially; 2) many threats are interlinked -- for example, erosion from construction of transportation infrastructure may also force villagers to expand agricultural production to new areas; mass tourism may create new markets for wildlife products. As a result, some of the threats listed in the diagram above are merged into each other in the following narrative analysis. Major direct threats include:
Forest ecosystems in the region were under intense pressure from commercial harvest by state-run enterprises from the early 1950s until a national logging ban took effect in 1998, limiting logging to subsistence needs of local communities. State forestry management laws and regulations have traditionally prescribed a "quota management" system. In principle, such a system requires sustainable resource use by stipulating that annual timber harvests should be less than annual forest growth. In practice, however, the quota management system had been consistently overwhelmed by political events or development pressure. When timber markets were opened in the 1990s, no strong management mechanism was in place to properly deal with market-driven overharvesting by logging companies owned by different levels of government and by the communities that were involved as contractors and labors. At the same time, forest users did not pay sufficient attention to replanting in state-owned and collective forests. Compounding management problems, forest inventory statistics are often inaccurate, resulting in logging quotas well above annual growth increments. The resulting overharvests, combined with land conversion for agriculture, were the main causes for the loss of 85 percent of old-growth forest cover along the Upper Yangtze during this period.
In the 1950s, Western Sichuan was reported to have a natural forest cover of 9.8 million hectares. By the 1990s, overharvesting had reduced the natural forest cover to 2.4 million hectares, a 76 percent decrease. The 1998 national logging ban has been largely effective, but illegal commercial logging still occurs on a small scale. Logging for local use is permitted, which, combined with the land tenure issue (see below), may still have a local impact on biodiversity. It was reported that approximately 80 million cubic meters of illegal logging occurs nationwide each year. The impact of subsistence logging is difficult to quantify, but can be significant. For example, a case study by The Nature Conservancy in Diqing prefecture, Yunnan, showed that 960,000 cubic meters of logging for household needs was approved in one year.
As a result of the logging ban, current logging is predominately a subsistence activity sold in local markets rather than large-scale commercial activity. However, timber extraction from neighboring biodiverse countries such as Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Russian Far East and as far as Western Africa has increased for exportation to China as a result of the policy-raising the larger question of how China will sustain its timber needs over time.
The harvest of endangered animal and plant species is one of the most acute causes of species population decline in the region. Although hunting is almost always illegal, many reserves and law enforcement units are not sufficiently staffed or funded to enforce wildlife laws effectively. Significant declines have already been recorded in economically valuable species such as the musk deer. Due to weak law enforcement and management capacity, harvesting of wild plants and other nontimber forest products that are sold primarily for use as foods or traditional medicine is often unsustainable. Overcollection of certain nontimber forest products, such as orchids and matsutake mushrooms, is already apparent in many areas. In some places, highly sought-after species are no longer found outside of strictly protected nature reserves or have disappeared altogether. The importance of hunting and foraging for nontimber forest products in local economies has increased as a result of the logging ban and a growing market for these products.
In addition to the local poachers and collectors supported by illegal and legal harvest of wild animals and plants in the region, there is a chain of middlemen who profit from moving these items from the initial supplier to the consumer. Middlemen often come from provincial centers, and then hand off these commodities to brokers in major Chinese cities, who then may ship them on to international centers such as Hong Kong, Sydney and San Francisco. Therefore, it is important to note that addressing this threat will require interventions not just at the local level, but also at the levels of national and international end-use markets. In the case of legal harvesting and trade, there is little monitoring and baseline data available to support sound management that prevents these activities from being unsustainable.
A study by the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development showed that approximately 53 percent of animal products commonly used in Chinese medicines come from nationally and internationally protected animal species. Since harvest levels are very sensitive to market demand, markets represent a potential control point.
Construction of infrastructure such as roads, dams and power grids is an important part of regional development plans. Basic infrastructure is lacking in many areas - for example, there are only 9.7 kilometers of road per 100 square kilometers in Western Sichuan, and many villages are inaccessible by road. The government is committed to changing this situation, and the Western Development Program features slogans calling for road access, television, telephone and electricity for every village. However, infrastructure projects generally fail to include environmental impact assessments or other mitigation plans. Road projects directly and indirectly damage ecosystems. Another side effect of greater road access is increased potential for trade in wildlife and nontimber forest products.
Collection of fuel wood, which is permitted under the National Natural Forest Protection Program poses a threat to forest ecosystems. There is little fine-scale information on consumption in the region, but year-round heating, cooking and preparation of livestock feed require large volumes of fuel wood. While consumption levels vary with altitude and between ethnic groups, an average household will consume between 10-30 cubic meters of fuel wood per year. In Yunnan's Diqing prefecture, for example, this amounted to 600,000 cubic meters of fuel wood in one year. Before the logging ban, a substantial percentage of fuel wood was collected from logging slash on state-owned lands; now villagers are forced to rely more heavily on their own collective forests. In most areas, these forests are not managed in a sustainable manner.
This rapidly growing sector of the Chinese economy has created high hopes for both economic development agencies and environmentalists looking for alternatives to the timber industry in this region. As Chinese citizens have increasing leisure time and disposable income, growing numbers of domestic tourists flock each year to nature reserves and wilderness areas. While there is potential to harness this market to support sustainable management of these areas, mass tourism as currently practiced is harmful to local environment and culture. Construction of new roads, hotels and cable car tracks in natural areas - as well as increased demand for food, fuel and water - are all factors in habitat degradation. Particular care must be taken to limit the impact of the growing demand for "green food," i.e., natural delicacies collected from the wild. Furthermore, as in many other countries, tourism usually benefits outside developers rather than local communities. Few measures have been taken to control the volume and impact of tourism. A recent government proposal would allow privatization of tourism management in scenic and natural areas, but the proposal offers little guidance on environmental standards for private management. Although the term "ecotourism" is widely used to describe the tourist industry in natural areas, there are few examples of sound ecotourism projects in the region.
Conversion of forestland for agriculture has reduced, fragmented and degraded natural habitats. Expansion of agriculture during the last 50 years has been driven heavily by population growth. In addition, government mandates to reach unrealistic production targets caused local governments to expand the area of production to relatively unproductive lands from the 1950s to the 1970s. Similarly, in some areas, population growth along with relocation of immigrants to areas outside of their traditional agricultural practices has expanded the area of cultivation and introduced farming practices not suited to the locality. Total population in China - the most populous country in the world - according to the 2000 population census is 1,273,111,290 and increasing daily by 31,000 people at an estimated .88 percent yearly growth rate. The provinces that overlap with the hotspot: Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, Qinghai and Gansu have a combined population of 160,000,000. This rapid population growth is a potential obstacle to conservation in this region. The extreme topography characteristic of the region is another serious challenge to sustainable agriculture and has resulted in a number of secondary environmental problems. For example, of the 4.5 million hectares under cultivation in Sichuan, approximately 760,000 hectares under cultivation occurs on land with slopes above 25?lope lands contribute 11 percent of total grain production in Sichuan or nearly 4 billion kg per year, with an average yield of 5,190 kg per hectare. Unsustainable cultivation of sloping lands has led to high levels of erosion and landslides. It has created tracts of scrub wasteland in some places. Livestock are an important part of local agriculture, however, overgrazing presents a serious threat to high altitude pastures and forest regeneration efforts. Since the late 1980s, Chinese law has prohibited forest clearance for cultivation. Under the government program on converting sloping farmland to forest and grassland launched in 2000-Grain to Green-further clearance of forestland for agriculture will not likely happen at a large scale in the near future.
The scope and intensity of threats to habitat and wildlife are driven indirectly by policies or socioeconomic conditions at the national, provincial and county levels. As in the case of direct threats, and perhaps to an even greater degree, there are strong links among distinct indirect factors. Therefore, some of the threats shown in the above diagram are merged together for the convenience of analysis.
Government policies have promoted rapid economic growth since 1980, stimulating local demand for improved living conditions. From 1949 to 1995, the population living on the upper Yangtze grew by 120 percent to 163 million. A growing population and resulting development have greatly increased the pressure on land and forest resources in the region. In the 1990s, with growing awareness of environmental degradation and its consequences, sustainable development and environmental protection were incorporated into China's national development strategy. However, development policies, once implemented, tend to encourage short-term economic benefit and seldom take long-term economic sustainability and the environment into consideration. For example, the Great Western Development Program currently under way aims to bridge the gap between affluent coastal areas and underdeveloped interior provinces. Although sustainability is a nominal component of the program, erosion, landslides, and habitat fragmentation and alteration are inevitable results of the program's large-scale infrastructure projects, especially when responsibility for implementation rests at the local level. The impact of ancillary industries-for example, concrete-are also evident already.
Environmental policies often suffer from insufficient scientific analysis and, as a result, implementation is often incomplete and less effective. Well-intended environmental initiatives sometimes lead to new problems. For example, since the 1980s, the Chinese government has launched several large-scale planting programs in the Yangtze watershed, including the recent National Natural Forest Protection and Grain to Green programs. Over the years, monoculture plantations have emerged and exotic tree species have been introduced, reducing both biodiversity and timber yields. In some areas, monoculture plantations suffer serious pest outbreaks. Even though the National Natural Forest Protection Program provides substantial funding to offset lost income, the funding goes only to state-owned logging companies and local governments-not to communities or individuals. Local people, therefore, turn to new sources of livelihood, such as nontimber forest products and wildlife trade, with adverse ecological impact.
Poor Reserve Management
Since 1990, China has been rapidly expanding its nature reserve system. By the end of 2000, China had 1,276 nature reserves covering a total of 12.4 percent of the nation's land. However, there has never been a stable financial mechanism in the national budget to support these protected areas. Even when government funding is available, it is usually limited to one-time appropriations to build infrastructure. In Yunnan, operating budgets in reserves are paid by the provincial government, while reserves in Sichuan are mostly paid by counties. Consequently, many protected areas remain protected only on paper or are forced to generate income. The latter is not only inconsistent with the purpose of protected areas, but also a source of conflict with local people competing for resources. Some reserves are given multiple designations-scenic area, forest or tourism park, and nature reserve, such as Jiuzhaigou and Gonggashan in Sichuan-each function being managed by a different government department with a different regulatory agenda. Overlapping mandates cause confusion, undermine the coherence of management plans, and marginalize conservation objectives. There are no standard criteria or mechanisms to evaluate the effectiveness of nature reserves. Combined with weak institutional capacities and poor staff morale, these factors limit the performance of reserve management. The World Bank-sponsored National Forestry Nature Reserve System Plan study states that, "of 217 reserves, 25% of nature reserves have no patrols; 75% have no monitoring programs in place; and 70% lack comprehensive inventories of resources." The results of these studies form part of the outputs of the World Bank/GEF China Nature Reserve Management Project produced for the Wildlife Division of the State Forestry Administration.
In rural areas of China, political changes over the last fifty years have been felt most directly through repeated changes in land tenure arrangements. Two major changes are land nationalization and communization in the 1950s and household responsibility or privatization that started in the late 1970s and is still continuing today. These tenure changes, together with the irregularity in the administration of land-tenure policies, introduced uncertainty to land tenure, often with negative environmental consequences, such as rashes of illegal logging and preemptive clearing of land. Today most forestland falls into three basic categories of tenure: state, collective (community forests) and household (use rights). The actual resource use by local communities, however, often does not follow the official boundaries of tenure, making resource management difficult. Reasons are often complicated. For example, many ethnic Baima villages in Pingwu County, northern Sichuan, have had neither collective nor household forests allocated since the 1950s. As a result, the Baima people have long illegally collected fuel wood in state-owned forests around villages. In addition, the insecurity caused by constant policy change has made it difficult to link rights and responsibilities, especially when such responsibilities require long-term commitments. After the National Natural Forest Protection Program launched, individuals invested in tree plantations for future sustainable timber harvesting under a 30 or more year land lease contract suddenly lost the ability to manage their lands for timber due to the logging ban. The Grain to Green program encourages farmers to plant trees by providing them with financial subsidies and issuing the rights of harvesting the trees they planted. Yet under the logging ban, such a right becomes uncertain. Inconsistent policies cause confusion. With increasing privatization of land and resources in this region and in China there is an acute danger that private contractors, especially those from outside, are only managing for short-term economic return. Examples of such cases are already evident.
Although indirect pressures and the following root causes are intertwined and difficult to rank individually or separated clearly, it is worthwhile to point out the factors that have a fundamental impact on most direct and indirect threats. In other words, by changing these factors, many efforts that attempt to deal with the threats will benefit. These factors can be summarized as follows:
Government and civil society lack or have poor access to sufficient ecological data and analytical information on social economy to inform their decisions. Conservation efforts are inconsistently monitored and evaluated, and when they are, the resulting information is inconsistently shared among conservation players and with decisionmakers. Therefore, it is difficult to accumulate institutional memory and benefit from lessons learned. Lack of sufficient information and awareness has led repeatedly to policies that do not take biodiversity conservation into consideration. In general, people recognize the importance of forests for resources and erosion control and the importance of clean air and clean water to human health, however, the ecological value of biodiversity in human life is less informed.
Furthermore, the ecological impact of development and economic policy is often ignored simply because the importance of biodiversity is not understood. Development policies often set economic growth as the most important criterion for evaluation. At perhaps the most fundamental level, failure to value biodiversity is a root cause of environmental degradation. A sustainable approach to conservation must inform communities, business and government of their connection to nature and offer alternative lifestyle choices.
This region contains extremely complex patterns in the distribution of biodiversity. Existing information is scattered and often non-accessible to non-specialist audiences. Existing information on biodiversity and conservation in the region needs to be pooled, managed, mapped and synthesized to make it more accessible and to ensure the appropriate information is used to inform policies, projects and programs.
Even when stakeholders are motivated to protect biodiversity, their financial, technical, and management capacities are often insufficient. Leadership capacity is lacking at many levels-government, community and nature reserves-and impedes all aspects of conservation action, from policymaking to grassroots initiatives. Conservation professionals often have inadequate training or preparation. For example, in a GEF survey of 217 reserves, only 3 percent of staff was found to have a four-year college education, while nearly 26 percent had little or no education. Most reserve directors do not have the necessary knowledge of biology and ecology nor necessary management skills to deal with complex conservation issues. The new National Natural Forest Protection Program pays for former loggers to become forest wardens and managers but without adequate provision for education and training.
With the trend toward privatization, communities will play an increasingly important role in China's civil society. Sustainable resource use will increasingly depend on improving capacities for self-governance at the community level. The social awareness and skills on resource management at village level, which integrate with traditional indigenous social system, will be critical.
Capacity, in turn, depends on training. Few universities and institutes offer conservation education programs and even fewer offer multidisciplinary training to solve practical problems in conservation. Capacity building is an urgent need in this region and throughout China.
Previous: Biological Importance / Next: Synopsis of Current Investments