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Water Champion: Shaoxia Cheng
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Mr. Shaoxia Cheng is the Director of the Project Management Office of the Sanjiang Plain Wetlands Protection Project, the new $55 million project on wetlands management funded by the ADB, Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Mr. Cheng has long been involved in wetlands protection and management from the administrative and policy perspectives. He currently serves as Director of the Foreign Capital and Cooperation Division of the Heilongjang Province (HP) Forestry Department. This is the only agency mandated to manage wetlands in HP. He is also a member of the Provincial Wetland Protection Committee, and has participated in a variety of wetlands-related projects through the years. On the policy side, Mr. Cheng was involved in the drafting of the Provincial Ordinance on Wetlands Protection, the only policy on wetlands protection in the province. Project Background
The new Sanjiang Plain Wetlands Protection Project is designed to manage watersheds in an integrated manner toward the protection of humans and biological diversity. It will restore the wetlands' function as a natural flood control mechanism, and conserve a globally important area of biodiversity.
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The PRC gives high priority to wetland biodiversity conservation, watershed protection and sustainable management of natural resources.
By the end of 2000, PRC has established 1,276 nature reserves (NRs) covering a total of 123 million hectares (ha). This is equivalent to 12.4% of the national land area.
On July 1992, we ratified the Ramsar Convention, and three wetland NRs1 in the Sanjiang Plain are now listed as wetlands of international importance.
In January 1993, we also ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity, and issued a Biodiversity Conservation Action Plan in 1994. Conservation of the Sanjiang Plain is given the highest priority in this plan.
The Government has adopted several important national policies and legal measures to guide and direct habitat restoration and biodiversity conservation. For instance, the Wild Animal Protection Law of 1988 reduced the overexploitation of wildlife from hunting and egg collecting. As already mentioned, the Government ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1993 and issued the Biodiversity Conservation Action Plan a year later.
In the Heilongjang Province (HP), we issued the policy establishing priority wetland NRs2 and suspended the further conversion of wetlands to farmlands.3
In 2002, the PRC Government approved the National Wetland Conservation Action Plan, which identified priority actions to guide the conservation, use, and management of wetlands. The HP Government reinforced this a year later by issuing one of the PRC's first wetland regulations.4 These new regulations recognized the multiple values of wetlands, the need for their conservation and wise management through the establishment of NRs, and the reality that wetlands and their wildlife remain threatened by expanding agricultural activities and by water and land resource exploitation.
Despite these impressive legal steps, however, we remain challenged in terms of developing the appropriate technologies for wetland restoration and protection and sound wetland management expertise.
Our department pushed for the integration of wetland protection into the legal system. We lobbied with the HP Provincial Council, and the Council eventually passed the Ordinance of Wetland Protection. The Forestry Department also employs systems engineering in managing wetlands, and works to gradually improve the environment according to law.
The Sanjiang Plain is one of PRC's richest regions in terms of globally significant flora and fauna. The Plain supports about 37 ecosystems, 1,000 species of plants, and 528 species of vertebrate fauna, including 23 of the globally threatened species on the World Conservation Union Red List. These wetlands are also ranked as globally important in the Directory of Asian Wetlands.
In transforming the Sanjiang Plain into a major grain production field over the last five decades, the unfortunate trade-off has been the significant loss of plant and animal biodiversity. Large wildlife such as the northeast tiger, red deer, and bear have been destroyed, and formerly abundant ducks, geese, cranes, and other waterfowl have nearly disappeared. For these wetland-dependent wildlife species to survive, the continuing degradation of the Sanjiang Plain wetlands must be reversed.
This new project is very timely because it is designed to put the Sanjiang Plain's ecosystems back on a sustainable path.
The Sanjiang Plain Wetlands Protection Project differs significantly from other wetland conservation in the PRC in its close linkage of watershed management with the management of wetland nature reserves, and with the way it directly addresses the needs of the plain's local residents.
The Project will protect globally significant wetlands in contiguous watersheds by expanding the forest areas upstream and protecting the downstream wetlands and NRs. It will restore 3,433 hectares of wetlands and repopulate wetland natural reserves with globally threatened wildlife species.
Five contiguous watersheds5 and six NRs with greatest concentration of biodiversity6 in the selected watersheds will directly benefit from habitat and wildlife protection.
The biggest challenge, I think, is keeping our momentum going. But we are very determined--- not only to do all we can for this project, but also to ensure that our frameworks, insights and experience are replicated in other parts of the country. The PRC has a lot of wetlands, and we are determined to protect and conserve each one of them.
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