South China's Guangdong Province is expected to establish the country's first coastal green belt by expanding mangrove plantations, sources with the provincial Forestry Bureau said yesterday.

The five-year project is also seen as an effort to protect the wetlands and wildlife in the province's coastal areas.

"By planting a large number of mangroves, the wetlands will become a green Great Wall along the coastal areas to protect and encourage the return of wildlife species," said Zhang Mingguo, an official with the bureau.

As part of the campaign launched earlier this year, 500 million yuan (US$60 million) has been earmarked to plant 50,000 hectares of mangroves in the wetlands.

The plant, found mainly in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is the major feature of the wetlands in the south of the country.

Sources with the bureau said the coastal areas used to have more than 20,000 hectares of mangroves. But now only 3,400 hectares are left.

Unless measures are taken to protect the wetlands, a large variety of wild species stand to lose their natural habitat.

According to a recent investigation of the province's wetland and mangrove resources, Guangdong has more than 1.86 million hectares of wetlands, of which more than 50 percent are found in coastal areas.

Of these coastal wetlands, more than 20,000 hectares are suited to the protection and growth of mangroves.

Key coastal areas include Zhanjiang, Shantou, Jiangmen, Maoming, Shenzhen and Yangjiang.

The mangrove can be seen as a kind of rare marine biological resource due to its ability to conserve the water-based ecological environment, Zhang explained.

Guangdong has already established a total of nine mangrove natural protection and reservation zones and it will establish a further three wetland protection zones in its western and eastern areas, as well as the Pearl River Delta region.

(China Daily July 20, 2005)