Snow Leopard Survey and Conservation Report

On October 23 (World Snow Leopard Day), we released China’s first “Snow Leopard Research and Conservation Report” we organizations prepared with several Chinese wildlife research and conservation agencies. It shed light on the current status of snow leopard surveys, conservation practices, and studies in the country along with an analysis of the main threats and conservation gaps.
We found that the current coverage of snow leopard population surveys only accounts for 1.7% of the snow leopard habitat in China – a huge gap remains. Major threats to the species, they include climate change, insufficient capacity of grassroots protected areas and low motivation for community-based conservation vary from province to province, require targeted conservation measures. They Based on these analyses, the report puts forward key suggestions for snow leopard conservation in the next five years.

An Urgent Call to Update China Red Lists

Based on the advice in “China Nature Watch 2016”, we have drafted an Urgent proposal on updating China Red Lists (Fauna and Flora), to which a “Plan on Amending China Red Lists” and the “Second Edition of the Discussion Paper on China Red Lists” were attached as supporting documents.
During the NPC and CPPCC sessions in March 2018 this proposal was submitted to the 13th CPPCC session by CPPCC members Zhang Endi and Ma Jin. In September 2018, the proposal received a public official reply from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (Ref No. 3061 of 2018).

EIA Early Warning

A deep collaboration with environmental agencies allowed us to identify potential biodiversity risks of development and construction projects in the EIA process by superimposing their locations onto the mappings of species and protected areas in the China Nature Watch database. We also plan to develop a biodiversity impact assessment (BIA) tool to pre-warn risky construction projects.