A big article in BioScience looks at the state of nature reserves in China, and finds them lacking. According to the press release:
Protected area managers in many cases currently lack basic data about which plant species are present on their reserves and even the exact area and extent of the reserves. Consequently, the effects of China’s rapid economic development, the related spread of invasive species, and the growth of tourism could drive to extinction species that could be sources of future crops and medicine.
Some things worth mentioning, from the article itself. 1 First, nice to see crop wild relatives getting a look in, although there is no mention of the agricultural biodiversity already being used by farmers either in the protected areas or outside them. Secondly, although the authors suggest preserving “very rare and threatened species” in some of China’s more than 140 botanic gardens, they don’t talk about conservation in genebanks, and they don’t talk about incentives for in-situ or on-farm conservation. In fact, the only incentives mentioned are those government should offer to persuade people to move out of the protected areas and into the cities.
So, once again, people are the problem. “Conflicts between the interests of rural communities and nature conservation need to be resolved,” and the way to do that is to move the people out of the way of conservation.
China has an opportunity to lead the world in developing a coherent conservation policy for plants important to agriculture, one that recognises the importance of diversity (as much Chinese agriculture has done), that integrates the various different forms of conservations, and that enlists the people who actually interact with plant diversity, manage it, even if only by default, and thus help to determine its future.