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China’s decision to ban land reclamation is set to boost the breeding of endangered migratory birds.
Every year, migratory birds like reddish-brown Spoonbill Sandpipers flock at Tiaozini mudflats in Jiangsu Province on China’s eastern coast after flying 5,000 kilometers from Arctic Russia.
During their three months stay, Spoonbills shed their old feathers and grow new ones for their journey back to Russia.
Wetlands in Jiangsu Province, a coastal region to the north of Shanghai, is also famous among ornithologists for stopovers for the Spoonbill Sandpiper, a critically endangered bird that numbers only 220, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Relict Gull another migratory bird that breeds in China's wetlands
has been put into vulnerable category by IUCN due to habitat loss and climate change. There are only 12,000 Relict Gull left.
China’s coastal wetlands are important breeding, stopovers, and wintering sites not only for Spoonbills but also for around 50 million migratory birds along the East Asia–Australian Flyway.
China is located just at the center of the Flyway, a route for migratory waterbirds from Alaska and Arctic Russia with their wintering grounds in South-east Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
Almost the entire world population of Relict Gull, Sunder’s Gull and Spoonbill breed in the Bohai Bay at the border of Hebei Province and Tianjin Municipality.
In the last few decades, rampant land reclamation for port development and other economic activities had been destroying the habitat and breeding ground of these birds.
According to a study in 2015 by Paulson Institute and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geography, China lost 58 percent of its coastal wetlands, 73 percent of its mangrove forests, and 80 percent of its coral reefs, between 1950 and 2014 shrinking the habitat of migratory birds.
"I suggest that conservation and restoration of the coastal wetland become an integral part of the economic development activities in the coastal region,” said Paulson Institute Chairman Henry M. Paulson Jr in a press release.
Corrective measures to conserve the wetland and migratory birds’ breeding grounds
In 2015, China drew a “red line” to conserve more than 53.33 million hectares of wetland to mitigate the problems of flash floods and maintain the ecosystem. In February, last year, the Chinese government submitted a list of intertidal mudflats along the Yellow Sea and Bohai Bay.
The list included the names of 14 sites that have been added to the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage Site nomination. China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) also decided to conserve 16 marine parks and extend the wetland protection to nearly 124,000 square kilometers.
Relict Gulls at Tianjin Binhai New Area on March 14, 2017.
Lin Shanqing, deputy director of the SOA announced when addressing a press conference that reclamation projects that did not concern the national economy and people's livelihoods would not be approved in future.
"Reclamation projects that have been approved but have not started and do not comply with the current policy will all be stopped," Lin said, adding that the administration would also stop giving annual land reclamation quota to provinces, Xinhua reported.
"Using reclaimed land for commercial real estate development is prohibited, and all reclamation activities in the Bohai Sea area will be banned," Lin said. "Reclaimed land that has remained deserted for a long time will be confiscated."
China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF), a non-profit working towards the conservation of the wetland, claimed China’s decision is a significant step towards the "Beautiful China" target, which was proposed by the Report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
"It is also a great reflection on civil organizations' bottoms-up approach to promote environmental governance,” Linda Wong, deputy secretary-general of CBCGDF.
(CGTN)
