Shant Raj Jnawali marked World Volunteer Day on Tuesday by
taking a group of Chinese schoolchildren to a wetland conservation
project in a small county on the China-Russia border.
"This is the most beautiful wetland I've seen since crossing the
Himalayas," said the 46-year-old Nepali biodiversity specialist,
referring to the Sanjiang wetland in the conflux of Heilongjiang
and Wusuli rivers in Fuyuan, a county with 100,000 people in the
far east of China.
"Look at the animals' footprints," Jnawali waved to a group of
24 children trekking on the ice. "They're part of the entire
biosystem."
Jnawali knew the wetland at Fuyuan was endangered before he came
to the area three months ago as a UN volunteer for the Sanjiang
project. "The locals say the wetland used to produce loads of
birds' eggs and fishes."
When China suffered severe food shortages in the 1950s and
1960s, the wetland made way for farmland and produced ample grain
to feed the nation. The area has been known as the country's
largest granary ever since.
But encroaching farmland and other human activities in the past
decades have caused a sharp decline in the population of wetland
birds and animals, though the 190,000-hectare wetland remains
Asia's largest.
"It's a pity your generation will never be able to catch as many
fish and find as many birds' eggs as your grandparents did. That is
a lesson about breaking the laws of Nature. I hope your generation
won't repeat the mistake," he said.
Jnawali, a Norway-trained PhD graduate with 17 years of research
experience in worldwide wetland biodiversity, became a UN volunteer
last year to implement the Sanjiang project. He left his Katmandu
home three months ago and came to Fuyuan, 650 kilometers from
Heilongjiang's provincial capital Harbin.
Jnawali and his Chinese colleague Zhu Baoguang will spend at
least one year promoting wetland conservation knowledge to schools,
local businesses and communities.
"As UN volunteers our main mission is to take people to field
trips and build awareness about the importance of conserving the
wetlands," said Zhu, the Chinese coordinator for the Sanjiang
project.
The two volunteers have advised the local government in Fuyuan
to be more rational in developing eco-friendly tourism and
encourage farmers to increase their incomes by growing high-yield
and profitable organic food instead of just expanding their
cropland.
At the end of their field trip, the 24 teenagers vowed to
promote wetland conservation among their peers and in
communities.
Qin Yan, a senior student at Fuyuan No. 2 High School, said, "My
parents grow at least 10 hectares of soybeans next to the wetland.
That forms the bulk of our family income. But I never knew we owed
the bumper harvest to the wetland."
The 16-year-old girl said in future she would talk others out of
expanding their cropland into the wetland.
Sanjiang is one of the four UN-sponsored wetland conservation
projects in China, the other three being around Dongting Lake in
the central Hunan Province, Yancheng in the eastern Jiangsu
Province and on the border of the western Sichuan and Gansu
provinces.
The United Nations has sent nine volunteers to implement the
four wetland projects in China.
According to UN volunteer project officer John Floretta, the
United Nations Development Program and the WWF have worked with
China's State Forestry Administration in wetland biodiversity
conservation to invest a total of US$11.7 million.
A recent UN Human Development Report issued in November warned
that China must do more to preserve the waterways and the fragile
ecosystems of its northern areas.
(Xinhua News Agency December 6, 2006)
