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More than 100 Chinese wetland reserves along the Yangtze River joined forces yesterday to establish a protection network covering the whole Yangtze River Basin.

Poyang Lake Wetland in the Central Yangtze, Jiangxi Province [File photo]

The new network is an expansion of a previous one, the Central and Lower Yangtze River Basin Network which was established in 2007 and comprised about 40 wetland reserves from Shanghai and five provinces, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui and Jiangsu, as members.

Over the past three years, the network has protected an area of about 3,000 square kilometers of wetland and more than 50 kinds of rare and endangered species, such as the Chinese alligator and the David's Deer, or Milu, have been saved from extinction.

At the Fourth Annual Yangtze Wetland Network Meeting in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, yesterday, 62 new members joined the project which now covers 12 provinces and cities across the country.

Climate change

The network was established with the help of China's Forestry Administration and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

WWF officials said the objectives of the wetland network are to restore and improve the resistance of the wetland to climate change by enhancing effective management, setting up the monitoring of key species and conducting research and promotions.

Leaders of forestry administrations from the 12 provinces and cities signed the Wuhan Declaration yesterday, expressing their wish to protect the wetland in the Yangtze River Basin, which occupies a total area of 20,000 square kilometers, and make the Yangtze River Basin an ecological barrier to combat climate change.

Scientists at the meeting said wetlands not only played an important role in providing natural products and people's livelihoods, but also acted like giant sponges, slowing the flow of surface water and reducing the impact of flooding.

Extreme weather

"Similar to forest ecosystems, wetlands have an important role in regulating the climate and mitigating climate change," said a forestry professor surnamed Wang.

"Without the wetlands serving as an 'ecological buffer,' the country is more likely to suffer from extreme weather events and other effects of climate change."

However, the importance of wetlands was not seen by the government for a long time, and the country had lost about 40 percent of its overall wetlands since 1949 due to the population boom, inappropriate management and the lack of laws to protect them, said Ma Guangren, director of the wetland protection center of China's Forestry Administration.

Even the original idea of a wetland protection network had not come from the government, but was a joint effort by the WWF and HSBC China.

HSBC cooperated with WWF to protect wetlands in Hubei Province in 2002 and launched the Climate Partnership program in 2007 to tackle climate change.

"Our first project only covered three wetland reserves in Hubei," said HSBC official Huang Bin.

But now, and with help from the government, that had expanded to more than 100.