Integrating and updating wildlife conservation in China

Shiping GONG, Jun WU, Yangchun GAO, Jonathan FONG, James Ford PARHAM, Haitao SHI*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

China has about 11% of the world's total wildlife species, so strengthening China's wildlife conservation is of great significance to global biodiversity. Despite some successful cases and conservation efforts, 21.4% of China's vertebrate species are threatened by human activities. The booming wildlife trade in China has posed serious threat to wildlife in China and throughout the world, while leading to a high risk of transmission of infectious zoonotic diseases. China's wildlife conservation has faced a series of challenges, two of which are an impractical, separated management of wildlife and outdated protected species lists. Although the Wildlife Protection Law of China was revised in 2016, the issues of separated management remain, and the protected species lists are still not adequately revised. These issues have led to inefficient and overlapping management, waste of administrative resources, and serious obstacles to wildlife protection. In this article, we analyze the negative effects of current separated management of wildlife species and outdated protected species lists, and provide some suggestions for amendment of the laws and reform of wildlife management system. Gong and colleagues analyse the state of wildlife management in China and make suggestions for better integration of management efforts.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)R915-R919
Number of pages5
JournalCurrent Biology
Volume30
Issue number16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Aug 2020

Bibliographical note

Supplemental Information includes one figure and one table and can be found with this article online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.06.080.

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31471966; 31772486), the Biodiversity Survey, Observation and Assessment Programme of Ministry of Ecology and Environment (2019–2023), the thousand PhD program of Guangdong Academy of Sciences (2018GDASCX-0932), and the GDAS Special Project of Science and Technology Development (2018GDASCX-0107).

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