Ancient forests. Snow-capped peaks. And towering waterfalls rushing down the rocky slopes. China’s Shennongjia National Park is the stuff of legends, inspiring Chinese poets, artists and authors for thousands of years.
It is also home to one of the world’s most elusive primates, the endangered snub-nosed golden monkey, which winters in large groups, most of which are males, deep in Asia’s mountainous forests.
But this World Heritage Site is just a house for primates and a surprising landscape. It is also a critical watershed for a river that supplies energy to millions of people.
With investment from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is supporting partners on the ground in Hubei Province, China, to expand and better integrate shennongjia National Park coverage into national progress plans.
The allocation has provided a variety of benefits not only for the golden snub-nosed monkeys, whose numbers have increased more than 20% in two years, but also for other people living near the park.
“The unprecedented collaboration demonstrated across the many stakeholders involved establishes a new popular for China on how to work together on controlling domain landscapes,” said Max Zieren, task manager in the UNEP-GEF Biodiversity Unit.
The initiative is part of a broader UNEP effort to safeguard sensitive herbal spaces and endangered animals. This comes with the world facing what experts call a biodiversity crisis. Human activity has altered three-quarters of the Earth’s land surface and threatened 1 million species with extinction. .
In 2022, world leaders will later gather in Kunming, China, for the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP-15). It aims to adopt an ambitious global biodiversity framework after 2020: a ten-year strategy to repair biodiversity.
Shennongjia National Park, which has encouraged poets and artists for millennia, is one of the largest areas in China. Photo: Reuters/Liu Jiao
The unprecedented collaboration demonstrated through the many stakeholders involved sets a novelty for China.
Good for the planet, for people.
In collaboration with the authorities, the allocation has helped the livelihoods of local residents. The state government made direct invoices to the bank accounts of farmers and other members of the network. The program also provides them with part-time jobs as rangers, supports the progression of vegetable plantations, and is helping to establish facilities to raise chickens, pigs, and bees.
Tal is designed to help local communities live in accordance with their environment while addressing their fundamental needs.
“By running in collaboration with the park administration, my circle of relatives can now buy fuel to heat our homes, and we also use less wood for cooking thanks to the new energy-efficient stoves we have received,” said Wang Yulong, who lives on the outskirts of the park. This means that we don’t want to venture into the forest to gather so much firewood. It’s smart for us, it’s smart for the forest, it’s smart for everyone.
Beyond the instant benefits these systems provide to the local grid and ecosystem, they maintain the vital water source that is obtained throughout the region. This directly benefits millions of people through the electric power of the famous Three Gorges Dam while offering drinking water. to Beijing and to the maximum of northern China, the Danjiangkou water reservoir.
The number of endangered snub-nosed monkeys has increased by more than 20% in the past two years thanks to conservation efforts in Shennongjia National Park. Photo: UNEP/Max Zieren
Before the allocation began, this landscape was divided into 8 other nature reserves, with little connectivity for the large number of species that inhabit the area. Shennongjia National Park is now one of China’s largest national parks, and its coverage has been strengthened through its integration into the country’s five-year economic progress plans. These policy frameworks are the cornerstone of the Chinese government’s planning. This kind of built-in control of a national park at the point of the landscape and beyond the provincial borders represents a novelty for China.
“It’s not just about expanding an area,” Zieren said. “This task has been a great success in engaging and sensitizing local communities through the promotion of conservation, as well as the effective integration of biodiversity conservation into regional progress plans. “
The assignment also ensured that local stakeholders, from government institutes at the provincial and county point to citizens, were aware of the new job and socio-economic protections they would bring.
“In Shennongjia National Park, we are collaborating with the government to test national methods to consolidate protected spaces for greater ecological integrity,” said Zheng Lianhe, director of the Hubei Provincial Wildlife Conservation Station. public participation in the effective control of those vital herbal resources. “
UNEP is working with the Global Environment Facility to provide countries with the clinical basis, policy expertise and innovation needed to conserve, repair and take advantage of their biodiversity to a greater extent. Read more about the WORK supported through the GEF in the biodiversity chart here.
For more information on the expansion and conservation of biodiversity and the sustainable use of herbal resources in the Greater Shennongjia region, Hubei province or UNEP’s broader paintings on landscape recovery and biodiversity conservation, please contact Johan. Robinson@un. org.