Upper Yangtze River Basin, China
Water for More Than 400 Million People
The Yangtze River emerges from ice-fields high in eastern Tibet, meandering 6,300 km across China before spilling into the East China Sea just north of Shanghai. Along the way, it quenches the thirst of one-third of China’s population - more than 400 million people- who live in the river basin. Their lives depend on the Yangtze’s gifts: drinking supplies, irrigation for farms, and water for factories and hydropower. Yet rapid development is threatening the river’s fragile ecology.
Logging Banned to Reduce Flood Risk
Nearly 300,000 square miles of the river basin were once covered by forests; today less than one-third of those forests remain. Official reports highlight deforestation as a major contributor to the devastating 1998 floods, which killed thousands of people and left millions homeless. In response, China’s government has banned logging within much of the Upper Yangtze River basin and begun spending tens of billions of dollars to replant forests to help stabilize the soil.
Governments Reviewing Forestry Policies and Devising Programs to Protect Life-Support Systems
The next few years will be key for the survival of the Upper Yangtze River basin’s life-support systems. As China’s population continues to grow, Chinese officials are grappling with how to guarantee people’s welfare without sacrificing the environment, and many of them see the natural capital approach as a promising solution. National and provincial governments are reviewing national forestry policies and devising programs in which areas are protected because of their life-support functions and in which people are paid to help preserve them. This is a particularly difficult challenge in such a remote area, with so little reliable data, but it is an urgent one.
Collaborating With Experienced Organizations
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) have been active in the Yangtze River basin for years, working on projects including the conservation of the native panda (featured on WWF’s logo) and the golden monkey, restoration of wetlands and floodplains, eco-tourism, environmental education, alternative energy, and promotion of integrated river basin management. Other organizations and institutions active in China to protect nature’s services include Conservation International, Forest Trends, World Bank, and ICRAFT.
The Natural Capital Project is now working with local Nature Conservancy staff, government officials, Chinese scientists, and other partners in China. Providing technical advice, including new mapping and modeling tools, Natural Capital Project scientists hope to help government planners devise policies to preserve natural services including clean water for drinking and irrigation, soil retention, stable flows for hydropower production and flood control.
Updates From the Field
Ecosystem Services Modeling Workshop Held in Beijing September 10-14, 2007
The Natural Capital Project team and collaborators from the National Center for Ecological Assessment and Synthesis (NCEAS) met with Chinese scientists, conservation practioners, and government officials at a workshop co-sponsored by Stanford, China's national-level Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES), and the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The week involved peer review and discussion of methodologies, tailoring of the Natural Capital Project approach to China, and actual hands-on application of InVEST Tier 1 models to the Upper Yangtze River Basin.
In The News
Paying for Nature
China Dialogue, February 18, 2008
“Beijing's strategy for clean water during the Olympics? Pay rural farmers to 'grow' it. Katherine Ellison explores China's new hope for conserving the precious natural resources it has left. Last September...several Chinese government-affiliated scientists met with a team from the Natural Capital Project - a year-old partnership between Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and WWF. The project has developed mapping and modeling software to pinpoint landscapes where conservation makes the most sense, a tool that has great potential to help the Chinese government fine-tune its concept of preserving 'ecological function zones.'”
向自然还债
奥林匹克运动会期间，北京的清洁饮水战略是什么呢？付钱给郊区农民来“种”水。凯瑟琳•埃利森探讨了中国找回已失去的珍贵自然资源的新希望。根据国家林业局的数据，在过去8年中，中国已经向坡地环保项目投入了超过174亿美元的资金。但是，2005年一份提交给国际环境与发展学会的报告指出，这个项目已经出现了严重的缺陷，资金出现了严重的问题。为了努力改善该项目，中国领导人已经越来越多地加强了与美国科学家和NGO的合作，后者为鉴别和保护自然资源提供了最新的技术。例如，去年9月，几名隶属于政府的中国科学家会见了一个来自“自然资本项目”的小组，该项目由斯坦福大学、大自然保护协会和世界自然基金会联合开展，已经进行了1年。该项目开发出了绘图和建模软件，用以确定环境保护做的最好的地区，此软件作为一个工具，在帮助中国政府微调其保护“生态功能区”概念方面具有很大的潜力。