Twenty-two members of the
Chinese Academy of
Sciences and the
Chinese Academy of
Engineering, including Xu Zhihong, Yang Hanyi and Li Wenhua,
have appealed for an increase in the capital input in nature
reserves. They suggest the funding for nature reserves should be
brought into the state budget plan to guarantee the basic costs in
the construction and operation of such reserves.
The first nature reserve in China was set up in 1956, and there are
now 1,551 of varying kinds covering 14 percent of Chinese
territory.
The academicians said that due to long-time lack of appropriate
investment, quite a few reserves existed only in name, and their
attempts to become financially self-supporting had led to such
critical consequences as intensified contradiction between the
reserves and society, inefficient administration, a "tendency
towards isolation" of the reserve, or even retrogression.
At
present, the state's investments in nature reserves are totally
inadequate. In recent years, the annual funds for each reserve
invested by governments at all levels amounted to less than 200
million yuan (US$24.2 million). However, the annual investment in
per square kilometer area of nature reserves in developed countries
is US$2,058 on average, in developing countries, US$157, while in
China it is only US$52.7 -- probably the lowest among developing
countries. For example, in the past 17 years, the state-level
Xilingol Nature Reserve in Inner Mongolia received from the
government an average investment of US$2.46 for each square
kilometer of its territory annually. Now, 80 percent of the land in
the reserve is in a state of obvious retrogression, while the core
area covering less than 0.2 percent of the whole area of the
reserve is also suffering destruction. Meanwhile, the state has
allocated 160 million yuan (US$19.3 million) in the past two to
three years to tackle desertification and degradation of the
grasslands in Xilingol. Nature reserves should spare no efforts to
steer clear of the same disastrous course of "ravaging first and
preserving second" emerging from the process of economic
development, the experts said.
The academicians suggested that investments in the state-level
nature reserves should be immediately brought into the state
budget. An annual fund of just some 1 billion yuan (about US$12
million) is needed to meet the requirements of basic expenditure in
some 200 state-level reserves. Such investment was negligible
compared with that allocated to repair the ravaged environment, but
the ecological benefits produced from the former is priceless, they
argued.
(china.org.cn by Zhang Tingting, July 4, 2002)