Biodiversity Science in China

By Richard B. Primack

“Almost all our improvements, so called, tend to convert the country into the town.”

 Henry David Thoreau in his Journal.

 

Over the past 35 years, China’s massive economic transformation has come at a significant cost to the environment, in terms of air and water pollution, habitat loss, and threats of species extinction  

 

China has also emerged as a leader in biodiversity conservation and research. This is important because China’s enormous human population depends on ecosystem services and because of its astonishing richness of species. 

 

A strong centralized funding and political structure in China allows national scale biodiversity projects to be organized more effectively than most other countries. For example, the Chinese Academy of Sciences organized 850 universities to assess the natural resources and biodiversity of China.  

 

Between 1980 and 2005, the number of national nature reserves (similar to national parks elsewhere) in China went from virtually none in 1980 to over 400 parks protecting close to 100 million hectares. China moved people out of these newly protected areas, and gave them economic alternatives.  

Figure 1. The area under protection in nature reserves and national nature reserves increased from 1980 to 2005, but has been stable or even declining since then (from Li and Pimm 2020).

While the capacity of China’s academic and research communjty to investigate and protect its astonishing biodiversity is increasing each year, the threats to biodiversity caused by China’s expanding economy is also increasing. Reconciling these two opposing trends is the crucial challenge faced by China’s expanding community of biodiversity scientists. 

 

To find out more, read these two references:

Primack, R. 2021.  Biodiversity science blossoms in China.  National Science Review, in press.  doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwab058 

Mi, Xiangcheng, Gang Feng, Yibo Hu, Jian Zhang, Lei Chen, R.T. Corlett, A.C. Hughes, S. Pimm, B. Schmid, Suhua Shi, J- Christian Svenning, & Keping Ma. 2021. The global significance of biodiversity science in China: an overview.  National Science Review  

doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwab032