Legislators in central-south China's Hunan Province have completed the first round of discussions of the draft regulation on wetland protection, which is intended to provide a legal basis for its protection, an official said in Changsha. 

The draft regulation made rules in specific areas concerning the protection of wetlands on the principle of "protecting the important wetland and utilizing the ordinary," said Gui Xiaojie, director of the Nature Conservation Division of the Hunan Forestry Department at a Sino-German symposium on wetland protection, on Wednesday.

"Once adopted, Hunan will become the country's third province to set up a wetland protection law after Heilongjiang and Gansu," he said.

Hunan has a total of 56,000 sq km of wetland, four of which, namely the East Dongting Lake, West Dongting Lake, South Dongting Lake and Hengling, were listed in The Annotated Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance.

However, Hunan faces the problem of wetland shrinkage, degradation and biodiversity loss, giving negative impact on the province's sustainable development, Gui said.

During the symposium, about 30 experts including eight German professors and four academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences delivered their reports on wetland ecosystem services and management, "which provided a scientific ground for the development and utilization of wetlands."

"Wetland problems brought by rapid economic growth in China have caught the attention of scientists in Germany, where similar problems have occurred in the past," said Volker Heidt, professor from the Institute for Strategic Regional Management Department of Geography, University of Mainz. "Wetland protection is not only a national problem, but a global one."

"What we lack is not funds for wetland protection, but techniques," said Gui. "I hope this symposium will bring Chinese and German scientists to work together to protect the wetland in Hunan Province."

(Xinhua News Agency April 15, 2005)