Focus on Arts and Ecology

We spoke to Lo Sze Ping, who recently left his post as CEO of WWF China, about the changes he has seen in China’s environmentalism since 2000

By Ma Tianjie, October 28, 2020 

Since moving from Hong Kong to work for green NGOs in Beijing, Lo has seen China’s environmental movement go from the early days of “planting trees, watching birds and picking up litter” to the elevation of “ecological civilization” to a national strategy.

Having just left his post as CEO of WWF China, Lo Sze Ping recalls that when he first moved to Beijing, China had joined the WTO and “the power of reform and opening up was still being released.” Lo views the Chinese environmental movement within a larger historical context, with the tension between the local and the global an important theme.

In the early 2000s, he led Greenpeace’s arrival in China, integrating an organisation known for its non-violent direct action into the Chinese environmental movement, exposing to public criticism the deforestation of Yunnan by foreign companies and the exporting of waste to Guangdong by multinationals. He was also engaged in the environmental assessments for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, proposing a framework for assessing China’s environmental performance in the context of its stage of development. He went on to become secretary general of SEE Conservation, founder of Greenovation Hub and executive board chair of Friends of Nature, as he looked for a route for the Chinese environmental movement that differed from the thinking of Western organisations. In 2013, when he took charge of WWF China, he found another opportunity to integrate his international and local experiences in his work. In 2020, he decided he had “completed his mission in the mainland” and will, after he leaves WWF at the end of September, help establish a foundation to fund grassroots environmental NGOs in the Global South.

In an interview with China Dialogue before he left Beijing, Lo said that “Chinese environmental NGOs should respond to China’s developmental reality with a sense of agency.”

China Dialogue: Can you describe Chinese society back in the early 2000s?

Lo Sze Ping: When I came to work in Beijing in 2000, China hadn’t joined the WTO, although the negotiations were underway. The wave of reforms unleashed by Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour were gathering pace and by the late 90s, from an economic perspective, China was an arrow ready to be fired.

China wasn’t yet the factory of the world and the Pearl River Delta [where I came from] was still working to a cheap-labour and high-pollution growth model, which attracted investors from nearby Hong Kong, but not yet many multinationals.

If we think of the late Qing and early Republican period as China’s first wave of industrialisation, and the post-1949 years as the second, then joining the WTO marked the start of the third wave – and I arrived just as that was starting. Its negative side – large-scale pollution – hadn’t yet been noticed. Of course, there were some local pollution issues, but it wasn’t something the whole country was aware of.

And what about the environmental movement back then?

When I got to Beijing I met up with two people. The first was Liang Congjie, who founded Friends of Nature, the second was Jim Harkness, who at the time was China country director for WWF. At that time, these were the two most active, most visible people in the movement. There were barely any international environmental NGOs here, but WWF had been working on panda conservation since the 80s and had become very influential. This was just after the Yangtze floods of 1998, and the National Forestry Administration gave the WWF the opportunity to work on conservation along the river. There were human factors behind that once-a-century flood, and the WWF’s suggestions: stopping deforestation upstream, preventing more soil erosion, protecting river and coastal wetlands, and integrated river basin management, were all later adopted as national policy. I think WWF would have just been starting its freshwater projects – river basin management and wetlands conservation – in 2000, when I met with Jim Harkness.

I have very clear memories of calling on Liang Congjie. Looking back, I seem young and ignorant, but I thought the work Friends of Nature did, such as on-campus education, was too basic. I remember in the following years I would tell people that the Chinese environmental movement needed to move beyond educating the next generation – as the damage was already being done, on our generation’s watch, and we should concentrate our efforts on stopping that. I didn’t have the wisdom to take a more mature, longer-term view. Chinese environmentalism needs to be tenacious, to work bit by bit and achieve results over time.

Environmentalism was very weak back then, but there was work on conservation of the black-necked crane in the north-east and Wu Dengming was trying to protect environmental rights in Chongqing. By the time of the debate over the dams on the Nu River, a rather disorganised environmental network was starting to take shape.

Back then the Nu River debate and the State Environmental Protection Agency’s “environmental storm” crackdowns both highlighted a conflict between protecting the environment and economic development. What’s your view on that process?

I think the more important context for that time was the speeding up of the third round of industrialisation in 2002-2003, after WTO entry. Heavy and light industries sprang up everywhere, and just two or three years later there was growing awareness of the consequence of the blind pursuit of GDP growth. In some cases people were uneasy about the damage caused just by the construction work, before production even started.

Pan Yue, the deputy head of SEPA at the time, intervened in several cases, all during the development stage. From the controversy over the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of engineering projects inside the Summer Palace, to the establishment of EIAs for strategic and regional planning, to the restrictions on project approvals in key areas, the central government had to go through a procedural tug of war with local governments over project development. And that lack of order laid the foundation for later over-capacity in steel and concrete production, and in coal-fired power.

The issues our team at Greenpeace worked on – the Sinar Mas Group deforestation in Yunnan, GM crops, electronic waste – weren’t the core environmental conflicts at the time. But they did reflect the landscape of that period of rapid economic growth: companies ignoring public oversight, the importing of some out-of-date industrial methods, local governments ignoring the law, dealings between officials and the rich. Many environmental and development issues came to public attention. But at the time, Greenpeace didn’t have a complete narrative to articulate these problems.  

And despite those “environmental storms,” the later environmental degradation still happened.

In the end we still saw pollution, and of course one reason is that NGOs weren’t strong enough, but the main responsibility can’t lie with the people pointing out the problems. China was developing too quickly, too suddenly, and was too driven by economic growth. The government didn’t fully grasp this. It wasn’t until the Beijing smogs that we saw top Chinese officials change their understanding of development and the environment.

In 2008, Beijing hosted the Olympic Games, and the city’s environmental issues became an international topic. Greenpeace published a report at the time, titled Beyond Beijing, Beyond 2008. What did the Olympics mean for environmentalism in China?

I think 2008 was a watershed year, it was a year when China demonstrated its economic strength. And there was no way the Olympics could be held without discussing the environment, which was a matter of international concern at the time. That report looked at the problems with a growth-only model, and pointed out there was another, greener, route to development.

At the time, China wasn’t “green”. Although some green technology and measures were used in Olympic venues, as inspiration for the future, these weren’t the mainstream. But when we evaluate the environmental benefits of the 2008 Olympics, we shouldn’t just compare it with [other Olympic bidders] Vienna or Paris of the time. You need to look at how Beijing in 2008 had improved over Beijing in 2000. The population had doubled, the number of vehicles on the streets had tripled, so keeping air pollution at the same level would have been next to impossible. But I think reports like Beyond 2008 showed officialdom a new point of view: development can and should take place without an increased environmental footprint, and we should bring that about as soon as possible.

Later, in your role as an expert with the UN Environmental Programme, you took part in the environmental assessment for the Shanghai World Expo. Did that confirm your views?

The Beyond 2008 report accidentally landed us in the scenario where emerging economies such as China and the other BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and MINT nations (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) had to find some breakthrough in the relationship between the environment and development.

I went to visit coal-fired power plants in Shanghai as part of that assessment process, and had a number of discussions with colleagues from international NGOs. They were advocating a “No New Coal” approach globally, which I opposed. I thought that for developing nations that was unfair, unrealistic and illegitimate at that time, and taking that stance immediately disqualified you from discussing energy in China.

What I saw was that Shanghai had a de facto cap on coal-fired power. It never called it that, but the city encouraged renewables, and required all new coal power capacity to be replacements for older capacity. The new plants were more efficient and generated the same power with less coal. Shanghai was already trialling ultra-supercritical generators and had tough rules on scrubbing sulphur and nitrogen, which made coal power more expensive. I think for that point in time (around 2010) these were appropriate and progressive policies. If China as a whole had adopted those policies, we wouldn’t have seen such excessive expansion of coal power later. I think that was a more stable, realistic and fairer approach for a developing nation.

You later left international NGOs and joined SEE and founded the Greenovation Hub. Was that due to these ideas?

There was a link. I felt very strongly that the views coming from western environmental NGOs didn’t match the actual situation. They didn’t have a compelling argument for how emerging and developing nations could grow their economies while also protecting the environment.

When researching Shanghai’s waste policy, I found the city produced less waste per resident than the EU. The city government had already done a lot, but still had over 10,000 tonnes of waste to deal with every day. If you then sit opposite government officials and tell them they shouldn’t be building incinerators and landfill sites, they’ll think you’re being unrealistic. And that made me realise: we need to recognise that the mainstream stances of some western environmental NGOs don’t offer good answers to the actual problems these countries are facing.

I was very concerned at that point. I’d been working for international NGOs for 10 years, but I had a real longing to work closely with China’s grassroots NGOs. Our proposals had to be more localised, to be more convincing to the people who set policies, to be more realistic.

I moved to SEE after the World Expo job, because I wanted to see why entrepreneurs were concerned about the environment [SEE Conservation was founded by a group of Chinese entrepreneurs concerned with the environment]. What were they doing? What were they preparing to do? At the same time I became executive board chair of Friends of Nature. Meanwhile, some friends and I proposed the idea that “activists need to have a sense of agency” – they should look at the Chinese reality and look for appropriate stances and ways to engage, rather than reciting whatever some international organisation has written and translating it into Chinese.

And did things look different from that new viewpoint?

Once I got free of those restrictions, things looked much clearer. At that point the country’s top entrepreneurs were getting ready to work on environmental protection – so why weren’t China’s NGOs joining forces with them? I really liked what the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs did later, showing those entrepreneurs how they could use public pollution data to persuade businesses to make environmental improvements in the supply chain. Some of the SEE entrepreneurs were very concerned that their firms, or their suppliers, not appear on the IPE’s pollution maps, and that gave rise to the Green Supply Chains project. That interaction between IPE and SEE could be said to be the first time that China’s grassroots environmental forces joined up with influential decision-makers – and they were able to work together and achieve things.

As chair of Friends on Nature, I saw how it created the possibility of bringing environmental public interest lawsuits. And local groups, such as Chongqing Two Rivers, Green Kunming and Gansu Green Camel Bell, were at work too – all very small organisations, but full of ambition.

You just described the 2012 smogs as the point at which Chinese leaders changed how they viewed environment and development issues.

By the winter of 2012, the leadership would have seen very clearly that the business-as-usual development model was not sustainable. Something had to change. There was a clear change in language, with the “ecological civilisation” becoming a buzzphrase seen everywhere.

But if it hadn’t been for those quixotic efforts of green NGOs in the 2000s, those changes may have been less certain, or happened more slowly. Those organisations spent those years accumulating the power to build up the awareness and appropriate lexicon to mentally prepare the public for the environment and development debate. So when the opportunity for change arrived, everyone was able to recognise it and take advantage.

And what was behind your decision to go back to working for an international NGO in 2013, when you joined WWF?

I knew that WWF was looking for someone Chinese to head up development of the organisation. It was the largest international environmental NGO, and it wanted to localise, and that was a post where I could do some good. And looking back, that has been the case over these seven years. The WWF now is more localised and has a greater sense of agency.

In the past, money came from overseas, with other WWF offices funding on-the-ground projects in China directly and bypassing the Beijing office. We’ve just set up the Beijing office as an independent country office in the WWF network which can set its own policies and strategies, rather than acting as a branch of head office, and can place more emphasis on working within the reality in China. We’ve also had an internal reorganisation, and are fundraising in line with our own strategy.

Now we’re one of the most influential offices in WWF’s global network, and I think that’s a very important change. I think that reflects to some degree China’s increasing influence internationally, even though our budgets are much lower than other offices. I also contacted WWF offices in other developing countries and encouraged annual meetings on south–south cooperation. These are all things that have given me a strong sense of achievement.

During the 2010 Tianjin climate talks, you made a few observations and criticisms of Chinese environmental NGOs. What do you have to say to organisations about to participate in the talks on the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming?

I was an early advocate for the Civil Society Alliance for Biodiversity Conservation, so Chinese NGOs would participate in the conference in a more systematic and organised manner. I’m sure they will do better than in Tianjin. At the least, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment has invited NGOs to join the alliance – that’s not something you could have predicted a decade ago. That shows more trust and understanding between Chinese NGOs and the state.

I hope Chinese NGOs can mould some of the discussions on biodiversity, bringing in new points of view and the unique experience China has accumulated during its rapid development. What I particularly want to point out is that views in the west are still very dichotomic: the environment and the economy are in opposition, it’s a zero-sum game, if one benefits the other loses, and it’s best if nobody lives in protected areas. You still see these trends when major NGOs discuss the CBD targets. But we can’t protect half the planet and then leave the other half to be ruined.

Within the WWF, I’ve advocated for a New Deal for Nature and People. People have been living in protected areas in China since the WWF started working here four decades ago. There are plenty of locals even in the core panda reserves, their families have lived there for generations. In the Daoist tradition we have the idea of “grotto-heavens”, mountain and forest refuges away from the towns and cities – but these are still inhabited. For example, the Zhongnan Mountains outside Chang’an, Mount Qingcheng outside Chengdu, these are “grotto-heavens”. There were always clear understandings – no poisoning of water sources, no harming of wildlife, only careful use of fire. In terms of social function, this was a productive environment, but also a type of insurance – in times of war, people would flee to these refuges.

So these could be seen as the earliest form of protected area. And on this view, China’s protected areas have always been inseparable from people – people live there, they flee there. It’s like the yin-yang symbol, where each side contains the birth of the other.

Evidence on how deforestation impacts rainfall is mounting as new studies show more frequent dry periods that expose agribusiness

By Manuela Andreoni, Gustavo Faleiros, October 27, 2020 

Brazil’s 2020 grain harvest, which under Brazilian government classifications includes soy, will surpass 250 million tonnes, the Ministry of Agriculture announced on 10 September. This means the country’s soy production has quadrupled since the turn of the millennium – an historic record and the result of decades of work.

But, as soy advanced north and east it displaced cattle and pushed the ranching frontier into the Amazon rainforest, where agribusiness is testing both environmental monitoring capacity and the limits of nature itself, as the forest-created rain it depends on becomes increasingly scarce.

The sector’s lobbying groups depict this obstacle as an attempt by environmentalists and competitors to place the responsibility for the planet’s health upon the shoulders of Brazilian producers. But scientists argue that the destruction of the forest is drying up the rains that also irrigate national GDP.

Over the last decade, scientists and even agribusiness representatives themselves have pointed out that gradual changes in the seasonality of rainfall in the region represent the single greatest threat to Brazilian agribusiness.

Data from Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research (INPE) shows that yearly rainfall in Brazil has fallen almost 17% in the last decade compared to average levels over the past 40 years. There is no scientific evidence that this broad transformation can be uniquely attributed to deforestation, since to a certain extent the rise in temperatures caused by global warming explains the unpredictability of the rains.

However, scientists have been discovering more and more evidence that regional changes are direct results of deforestation.

According to climate scholars, the rainy season is starting later and is shorter in Brazil’s soy- and corn-producing regions. In a country where only a tenth of cultivated land is irrigated, this news is serious.

Research shows, for example, that deforestation in the Amazon has already caused the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil’s largest soy producer, to lose almost a month of rain, while the neighbouring state of Rondônia has lost roughly two weeks’ worth.

The Amazon rainforest recycles the moisture brought in from the Atlantic Ocean and generates its own rain. Between 30% and 50% of the rain that falls on the Amazon is known to result from water transpired by the trees themselves. Deforestation interrupts this cycle of evapotranspiration – the sum of tree transpiration and land and ocean surface evaporation – thereby decreasing precipitation that researchers call “recycled” rain.

Regions far from the Amazon depend on the movement of moisture from it. These regions include the Andes and the Rio de la Plata basin, which straddles southern Brazil, parts of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and south-eastern Bolivia, as well as large cities in the south and southeast of Brazil.

These flows are popularly known as “flying rivers”. Cutting down trees cuts the source of a mighty aerial river. Researchers at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) have dubbed such activity “agro-suicide”.

Deforestation and rain: new evidence

Researchers from UFMG’s Centre for Remote Sensing coined the term agro-suicide in a new and as yet unpublished article submitted to the scientific journal Nature Communications to illustrate what is already happening in some parts of the Amazon and Brazil’s midwest region.

One of the authors, forest engineer and UFMG researcher Argemiro Teixeira, explained in an interview that the group used yearly precipitation data focusing on an area known as the “arc of deforestation”, which bends from the southern to the eastern limits of the Brazilian portion of the Amazon.

They divided the land into grid cells with each pixel representing 27 square kilometres. Some of the cells have had such high levels of deforestation that rains have been irreversibly affected.

A previous paper by Teixeira showed that each percentage point increase in deforestation in the southern Amazon delays the rainy season in the region by between 0.12 and 0.17 days.

“What is most disturbing is that much of the arc of deforestation has already reached this point of no return,” says Teixeira.

Agribusiness: shooting itself in the foot

Brazil earned its reputation as an agricultural powerhouse because two or even three harvests can be obtained during the same year, rotating crops on the same land.

Because deforestation affects not only the quantity of rain but also its seasonality, this competitive advantage could be lost. A delay in the rainy season shortens the time available to plant for additional harvests.

Besides the UFMG study, other recent publications have come to the same conclusion. In September 2019, a group led by Marcos Costa of the University of Viçosa published a study in the International Journal of Climatology that found rainy seasons in Mato Grosso had approximately 27 fewer days of rain in 2012 than in 1998, a development that can be directly attributed to deforestation in the southern part of the Amazon.

Another article by researchers from the University of Richmond and Dartmouth College, in the US, published in Nature in June of this year, simulated the different effects of the loss of vegetation in the Cerrado savannah biome and the eastern and southern Amazon on crop yields, finding that the production of maize grown in the Cerrado could fall by between 6% and 8%.

Decades of scientific warnings about deforestation and rain

These threats are already well known to scientists and agribusiness representatives. Katia Abreu, a Brazilian senator and former minister of agriculture, says she learned about the flying rivers concept during her time as head of the National Confederation of Agriculture (2008–2011), which is the largest lobbying group for the sector.

“Now everything is turned on its head,” she says, regretting that the government is not protecting the interests of agribusiness through better environmental protection. “They do not want to face reality, but instead flatter half a dozen producers.”

Abreu learned about the aerial rivers from EMBRAPA, the Brazilian State Agricultural Research Corporation, which pioneered studies on the impact of climate change on food production in Brazil.

Eduardo Assad, an EMBRAPA veteran, published a scientific article in 2013 that looked at the length of dry spells within rainy seasons in the south, southeast and midwest and came to the same conclusion as recent studies: that global warming and deforestation have brought about extreme drought in the grain-producing region.

Assad’s research found that the length of dry spells within rainy seasons has become unpredictable in recent years. Although he adds: “We have been talking [about this] for 20 years!”

Yet the first warnings came even earlier, almost 40 years ago.

The physicist Eneas Salati of the University of São Paulo was already warning back in 1984 about the impacts that potential reductions in Amazonian rainfall would have on agricultural production in the country, via an article entitled “Amazon basin: a system in equilibrium”.

“Continued large-scale deforestation is likely to lead to increased erosion and water runoff with initial flooding in the lower Amazon, together with reduced evapotranspiration and ultimately reduced precipitation. Reduced precipitation in the Amazon could increase the tendency toward continentality and adversely affect climate and the present agriculture in south-central Brazil.”

Salati was a pioneer among those examining how Amazonian rainfall works in detail. In 1979, he published one of the seminal articles on the region’s moisture-recycling system.

By the 1970s, Salati’s work had captivated the Peruvian climatologist José Marengo, who was compelled to begin a 25-year career as a researcher in Brazil. Around 2005, Marengo was part of the group of researchers who helped popularise the concept of “flying rivers”. The first time he remembers talking about it was when he explained the movement of moisture to the aviator Gérard Moss. It was an adaptation of the term “atmospheric rivers” coined by American researchers in the 1990s.

“If you take all this moisture that passes over the Amazon and translate it into a volume of water, this volume is very similar to that of the Amazon River,” says Marengo. “You can feel this moisture, but you can’t see it.”

The concept was a major success in scientific communication. As Marengo tells it, congressional representatives and senators were able to grasp it easily. But scientific knowledge, even once made accessible to the general public, was still not sufficient to stop the devastation.

Between 1988 and 2019, an estimated 20% of the Brazilian Amazon was deforested, some 796,000 square kilometres, the equivalent of France and Italy’s land mass combined. In recent years, official data shows that the rate of deforestation is further accelerating.

Limits and changes

The world has never purchased as many agricultural commodities from Brazil as it does today. And over the next few decades this market is set to further expand. Taking into account the scientific evidence that deforestation affects rainfall in the regions that depend on it for production, the question becomes: at what point does agriculture become untenable?

EMBRAPA’s Assad says soy, maize and cotton are all at risk. “Brazil’s production model will reach a limit. What is important is not to hit record after record, but rather to maintain it. We need to regenerate our forests, recovering permanent preservation areas, because if this does not happen we will not have rain,” he says.

Marcello Brito, president of the Brazilian Agribusiness Association (ABAG), agrees. He says productivity gains in recent record harvests have been obtained despite increasing levels of systemic risk. “You may have gains in one region, but another will be profoundly affected.”

Brito cites this year’s near constant droughts affecting states in southern Brazil, which are also major producers of agricultural commodities.

This March, for example, the state of Rio Grande do Sul only had 28 millimetres of rain, a quarter of the historic average, leading farmers to beg for help from the government. The neighbouring state of Paraná had the worst drought since it began keeping records in 1997, getting just two thirds of the volume of rain expected between mid-2019 and early 2020.

Between those states and the Amazon lies Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest wetlands, which is now experiencing the worst drought in its history. Between November 2019 and March 2020, it received only 350mm of rainfall, 43% of the expected historic average of 810mm.

Researchers have been hesitant to relate the tragedy – which shocked the world with images of charred, dead animals – to Amazon deforestation. But the occurrence of extreme events is in line with the decades-old predictions of more irregular rain distribution.

Brito notes that the historical data on rainfall shows “a complete change in the cycle”, and for this reason the cost of production has increased. Some companies have sought out specific, drought-resilient seed varieties as a means of adapting.

The agricultural sector can be divided into those who believe in science, and those who deny it, Brito says. “In my view, the majority believe it.”

German Poveda, a Colombian climatologist who is part of the newly created Scientific Panel on Amazonia, argues that the case for halting deforestation is objectively clear: “The reasons to protect the Amazon are not ideological. They’re hydrological, climatic, geochemical.”

Changing the development model is the only way out, according to Poveda, who says that Amazonian countries should invest in an economy based on the sound science of how to best use its biodiversity.

“This is the only solution between development and environmental preservation, our last hope of being economic powers as Amazonian countries.”

This article was first published in Diálogo Chino.

Despite its negative reputation for heavy air pollution, Beijing is home to a stunning diversity of wildlife, especially birds. Some small steps could make this positive feature prevail.

By Terry Townshend, October 26, 2020

The other day, I asked my friends and contacts for the first word that comes into their head when they hear “Beijing”. The most popular response from my non-Chinese friends was “pollution”.

China’s capital city has an image problem. Yet I believe Beijing – my home for the last ten years and whose people and wildlife I have grown to love – has the potential to demonstrate how a modern city can be designed and managed to make life better for humans and for nature. At the same time it could transform its image to the outside world.

Beijing’s biodiversity

It is little known that the municipality of Beijing is one of the best major capitals in the world for birds. It ranks second among G20 capitals, behind only Brasilia, in terms of the number of species recorded.

G20 capital cities by number of bird species recorded

There are two reasons why Beijing is so good. First, its large size accommodates a variety of habitats with mountains, wetlands, grassland, forests and large parks. And second, and most importantly, its location. Beijing lies on a “bird superhighway” known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. One look at a map shows that, to the north of Beijing, there is a huge landmass – Siberia and Mongolia – dominated by taiga forest and, in the most northerly parts, tundra. In summer, there is an explosion of insects and millions of migratory birds fly north to take advantage of this high-protein food source to breed, raising more offspring, and more quickly, than if they stayed further south.

By winter, this area becomes inhospitably cold and the number of insects drops dramatically. So every autumn, there is a mass exodus of birds from northern latitudes, staggered from July (the earliest to move are the high Arctic breeding shorebirds, for whom the breeding season is just a few weeks) through to November (for the ducks, geese and cranes). Some will spend the winter in Beijing, others will go to southern China or Southeast Asia. Some fly as far as Australia and New Zealand and, as we have seen with projects to track the “Beijing Cuckoo” and the “Beijing Swift”, to Africa.

Most of these birds are nocturnal migrants and will pass over the capital undetected as we sleep (just put out a microphone pointing skyward on any night from late August to October and you’ll likely pick up lots of bird calls, providing a glimpse of the scale of migration over the city). However, some will stop in the capital, providing us with an opportunity to see them.

And of course, in spring, as the weather warms and the insects emerge, these birds flood back north, with Beijing again providing a stopover site. It is spring and autumn when Beijing becomes a world-class birding site.

It’s not only birds with which Beijing is blessed. Few major capital cities host populations of wild cats. In the mountains and wetlands of Beijing, there is a population of the Amur leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis euptilura). The common leopard (Panthera pardus), extirpated around the 1980s, is slowly heading back towards the mountains of West Beijing from its stronghold in the Taihang Mountains of nearby Shanxi Province. We can expect the first image of a common leopard in Beijing for decades, most likely from an infrared camera, in the next few years. Wild boar (Sus scrofa), Siberian roe deer (Capreolus pygargus), hog badger (Arctonyx collaris), Asian badger (Meles leucurus), raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), squirrels and chipmunks, as well as the mystical Siberian weasel (Mustela sibirica), can all be found. Beijing also has more dragonfly and damselfly species (60) than the whole of the UK (57).

Threats to Beijing’s biodiversity

Beijing’s rich biodiversity cannot be taken for granted. It faces a number of threats, including the following.

First, habitat loss and degradation resulting from urban development taking little or no account of biodiversity and ecologically important sites. Second, land management policies such as clearing of vegetation and covering with plastic netting (to prevent fire and dust), which deprive migrant birds of an important food source (seeds) and put microplastics into the soil. And third, illegal poaching primarily for the cage bird trade and exotic meat, which is ongoing across the municipality despite improved law enforcement in the last ten years.

A ‘blueprint for biodiversity’ in Beijing

To preserve Beijing’s strong foundation of biodiversity, the city could develop a blueprint for biodiversity, embedding the interests of wildlife and wildlife habitats into decision-making and setting targets related to key native habitats and species.

The first step must be to conduct a thorough biodiversity “audit” to better understand what the city has and to develop a baseline from which to measure progress. In addition to this, below are four practical ideas that could help strengthen the protection of wild places, restore habitats and engage the public. Importantly, these ideas do not require significant resources; in fact, they could generate resources for some of the poorest communities in the capital, as well as helping to raise awareness of biodiversity and improve the quality of life of its residents.

1. Allowing parks to be ‘10% wild’

Beijing’s parks are impressive and a huge positive feature of the city landscape. They are also important refuges for wildlife. However, they could be significantly better. A suggestion is to leave “wild” 10% of each park, meaning that plants would be allowed to grow without being cut, leaves allowed to drop and decompose, providing shelter for insects, and wildlife allowed to thrive. This 10% would not affect the overall look of the parks and, if signs and other information were erected, the initiative would serve as a positive addition to the parks by educating the public about nature. Each park could partner with a local school or schools who could monitor the wildlife in the parks and compare the “wild” areas with those managed in the traditional way, with the results published on interpretation boards in the parks. If successful, the percentage could be expanded. The Beijing government has recently agreed to pilot this idea in one or two parks next year.

2. Miyun reservoir: potentially a world-class wetland reserve

The Miyun reservoir is a major drinking water source in the northeast of the capital and a vital site for migratory birds, including cranes. Currently the site is being managed for water quality only, at the expense of wildlife. Important native shrubs and seed-yielding plants – vital food for many small birds in winter – have been ripped out and replaced by inappropriate tree planting.

The city could change the way this wonderful site is managed. Water quality would still be prioritised but the reservoir could also be a world-class wetland nature reserve, partly open to the public, with boardwalks, bird hides and an information centre, bringing millions of yuan to the local community.

England’s largest reservoir – Rutland Water – is managed for water quality, as a nature reserve and for public recreation using a zoning system. The nature reserve brings millions of pounds to the local economy as more than one million people visit every year, staying in local hotels, eating in local restaurants and using local services. Water quality is not adversely affected.

To consider these ideas, the Beijing government has now established a working group, which is making a preliminary visit to the reservoir this month.

3. A ‘wild ring road’

Beijing is organised into concentric ring roads. A “wild ring road” – a circle of unmanaged land that runs outside the sixth ring road – could link a variety of habitats from mountains in the west to woodland, grassland, rivers and wetlands around the city, acting as a haven and a corridor for wildlife. The wild ring road could include limited public access via a cycling and walking “capital circular route”, served by public transport at key spokes, thus creating a wonderful leisure opportunity for walkers and cyclists, as well as a home for wildlife.

4. Public engagement: voting for Beijing’s municipal bird

Public awareness is key to building support for biodiversity conservation policies. To celebrate Beijing’s more-than 500 bird species, residents could be invited to vote for a “municipal bird”, with the results announced by the mayor ahead of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity next year. Up to five candidate species could be nominated, each championed by an “ambassador” (for example, a celebrity or a school) and promoted by the media.Such an initiative would raise public awareness, cultivate a sense of pride and build support for policies to protect the city’s biodiversity.

Beijing’s opportunity in a global context

Globally, we are experiencing one of the most dramatic extinction episodes in history. Scientists estimate that we are losing species at around a thousand times the natural rate. If we continue on this trajectory, 30 to 50% of all species may be lost by the middle of this century, presenting profound risks to human prosperity and wellbeing.

Next year, representatives from more than 160 countries will meet in Kunming, Yunnan, under the auspices of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, to agree on a “new deal for nature”. However, national governments alone cannot tackle the biodiversity crisis. Home to more than half of the global human population, cities have a vital role to play in connecting people to nature, changing mindsets and developing innovative ways to make our infrastructure and homes good for nature as well as people.

As the capital city of the host country of these vital UN biodiversity negotiations, with a population of over 20 million and home to impressive biodiversity, Beijing is well-placed to lead.

Ten years from now, when I repeat my experiment, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the most common response was not “pollution” but “green”, “nature”, or “biodiversity”?