translated from Spanish: China wants national parks and protecting the environment

XINING, China (AP) — There is a construction boom in the Tibetan plateau, one of the few remaining remote sites in the world. Mountains traditionally covered with garlands with flags calling to pray, today they look full of steel poles of electric service. At night, signs illuminated at Sinopec gas stations spark a red glow on new roads. The region, known as the “roof of the world” because it is surrounded by some of the highest mountain ranges on the planet, is now at the center of a modernization plan in China, including skyscrapers and new railway lines.

But this time there’s a difference: The Chinese government also wants to contain the region’s growth so that it has one of the legacies that most detoll America’s proudest: A national park system. In August, politicians and scientists from China, the United States, and other nations met in Xining, capital of Qinghai Province, to discuss China’s plans to create a unified park system with clear guidelines for limiting development and protecting Ecosystems. The country’s economy has been flourishing for 40 years, but priorities are now expanding to include the conservation of important nature reserves, according to Zhu Chunquan, Chinese representative to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a scientific organization based in Switzerland.
“It is urgent to identify as soon as possible these sites, ecosystems and other aspects of nature” that need to be protected, Zhu says.

Another Chinese goal is to have its own Yellowstone Park on the Tibetan plateau. Zhu works with an advisory commission that provides recommendations for the nascent national park system, which is planned to open in 2020. Chinese officials have visited U.S. national parks, including Yellowstone and Yosemite, and sought advice from organizations such as the Paulson Institute in Chicago and Nature Conservancy.La national park network “is a serious effort For safeguarding China’s biodiversity and natural heritage,” said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm.One of the first pilot parks will be in Qinghai, a vast region in western China along Side Tibet, with a similar cultural legacy. Endangered species such as the snow leopard and the Chinese mountain cat live there. It encompasses the birth of three great asian rivers: the Yangtze, the Yellow and the Mekong.” This is one of the most special regions of China and the world,” said Lu Zhi, a peking university biologist who has been working in Qinghai for two decades. While construction continues at a frenetic pace elsewhere in the Tibetan highlands, the government has stopped issuing permits for mining and hydroelectric works in the region. But there is a serious question around the project: Is it possible to combine the drive to preserve with the promotion of tourism, preserving the livelihood and culture of the approximately 128,000 people living in the region?” China has a dense population and a long history,” Zhu says. “One of the unique aspects of China’s national parks is that people live there, inside or around them.” Yellowstone is considered the world’s first national park. After its creation in 1872, the Us government forced the original peoples living in the area to move to the surroundings of the park, following an old 19th-century thesis that the protection of nature meant that people could not live in Them. Today the countries of the 21st century have to see how they accommodate the local population.” The hardest part is how to combine ecological conservation with community livelihoods,” said Jonathan Jarvis, former director of the U.S. National Park Service, now a professor at the University of California, Berkley and who has inspected the March of the Qinghai Pilot Park, called Sanjiangyuan.China has already launched major relocation programs to clear land for infrastructure projects, such as the Three Gorges Dam and the South Water Transfer Project North. These displacements left many peasants in new houses with no land to cultivate or access to other jobs. In the case of national parks, the government is offering environmental conservation work to some people in Sanjiangyuan to keep the land working. The “One Family, a Ranger” program hires one person per family and pays the equivalent of $255 to perform tasks such as collecting trash and monitoring illegal hunting and grazing. It is difficult to interview people in places like Qinghai, because journalists’ restrictions prevent them from traveling freely in regions where there are large ethnic or religious minorities subject to strict controls. But a few people who live in Angsai, a Tibetan village inside the new Qinghai Park, were willing to speak. It is not possible to know if their experiences are typical of the locals. A-Tai breeds yaks and collects cordyseps fungi, used for medicinal purposes and purportedly to have aphrodisiac properties. He also leads a team of garbage collectors and travels up to 34 kilometres a day looking for plastic bottles and other waste as part of the “One Family, a Ranger” program. I live in this land and my livelihood is linked to this land,” says A-Ta as her sister warms water in her modest dwelling. A sign with the faces of Chinese Communist Party leaders, current and past, hangs on the wall. A-Ta says he is grateful for the job that allows his family to stay on this earth even though others have had to leave. His own son runs a relocation program focused on “a huge population of nomads” in Dzarto, a county south of Qinghai.” I love this land very much,” says A-Ta. “I always encourage people to protect the environment and contribute to conservation work.” Kunchok Jangtse is a Tibetan shepherd who also makes some money collecting trash under the program “One Family, a Ranger”. In addition, he volunteers with the non-profit Shanshui organization, installing and maintaining “trap cameras” that work with motion sensors that help scientists monitor endangered species in Qinghai.While installing a camera in a thin tree explains that “the reason I put it here is that this is one of the main migratory routes of most wild animals.” These cameras have caught white leopards and mountain cats, including mothers with their cubs playing alongside their temporary burrow. Kunchok Jangtse says protecting the environment and illegal hunting is important.” Our religion is connected to wild animals because they have a conscience and can love and be compassionate. That’s why you have to protect them,” he said. Kunchok says he makes about $2,380 a year by raising cattle and collecting mushrooms. That’s why he appreciates the additional revenue from the ranger program. Fingers crossed because your other activities are unaffected and you don’t have to leave one day.
“I have no education and I fear I would have a lot of difficulties in my life if I have to leave,” he said.

The culture and livelihood of the area’s people were a major concern of former Director of the U.S. National Park Service Jarvis. Also the enforcement of laws and the raising of funds.” We need a legal framework that describes what a park is,” he said. “And they need sustainable funding.” The creation of protected areas is not a new idea in China. In fact, about 15% of Chinese territory is part of a network of parks. But in many cases they are only on paper and are handled by agencies that have no way of enforcing the rules. The national park system, on the other hand, is being thought from the bottom to incorporate world best practices and the latest scientific advances. In his Beijing office, Ouyang Zhiyun, deputy director of the Eco-Environmental Science Research Center of the Academy of Sciences, reviews hundreds of carefully shaded maps of mainland China that have marked areas where it is necessary to protect endangered species and provide services such as water supply and measures to prevent land erosion. The important thing is not how many lands are protected, but which lands are protected, he says. Ouyang was recently primarily responsible for a “national ecosystem assessment” in which 20,000 satellite images and 100,000 field studies were used to analyze how land changed in China between 2000 and 2010. Some of the findings were published by the journal “Science” in 2016. One of the striking data from the study is that China’s urban areas increased by 28% in that period. Ouyang is now analyzing studies of more than 1,500 threatened species and plants to designate priority areas for conservation work.” If we don’t, they’ll disappear,” he said. The first parks incorporated into the national park system will highlight the country’s wide variety of landscapes and ecosystems, from the granite and sandstone cliffs of Wuyishan in eastern China to the dense forests of southern Sichuan, where there are giant panda bears, and one of the boreal forests of the northeast of the country, where the Siberian tiger, an endangered species, inhabits the Siberian tiger. When it comes to ecology, few countries have as much to lose, or preserve, as China.” A country as big as China literally decides the fate of species,” says Pimm of Duke University.



Original source in Spanish

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