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)