Protecting the Protected

In the far west of Xinjiang, covering some 78,000 square kilometers, the Lop Nur wild camel reserve was created in 2000 to protect 500 of an estimated 800 or 900 of the world’s last remaining wild camels. The area is also home to endangered wildlife such as the Tibetan wild ass, the Argali sheep, the goitred gazelle, wolves, foxes and the elusive snow leopard.

It is also home to some of China’s biggest mining concerns.

In early September, Lop Nur rangers embarked on a routine patrol of their jurisdiction, only to discover armies of prospectors, none of whom should have been operating within the reserve, hard at work.

Mining Camps

The Lop Nur reserve is divided into three parts. The 13,100-squarekilometer “core area” and surrounding 16,400-square-kilometer buffer zone are technically off-limits to tourism and industrial development, while the remaining 48,500-square-kilometer “experimental region” is open to development, including mining.

So far, over 20 mines operate in this experimentation region. Cixi iron mine in Hami is one of them. Located on the edge of the experimental area bordering on the buffer zone, the iron mine is 100 kilometers away from Yamansu, its nearest town. On this arid plain, miners endure harsh living and working conditions.

“Water and food have to be transported from Yamansu, and there are neither stores nor any kind of entertainment facilities. Even electricity is generated by the mine itself,” Zhang Chao, a Lop Nur engi- neer, told our reporter.

“During the daytime, it’s hard to find shelter from the sun or from sandstorms,” said Lu Dailong, owner of the Cixi mine, adding that the poor quality of his mine’s iron ore made the operation barely worth his time.

“The average price of iron ore is 600 yuan (US$ 96) per ton, yet our low-grade ore only sells for 300 yuan (US$ 48) per ton,” he told NewsChina. “We can barely pay our operational costs and worker salaries, so we have to keep the mine operating around the clock. ”

While operations such as Lu’s mine bring little benefit to the area even in terms of economic development, they stick to the experimental zone, obeying rules restricting industrial activity in a protected nature reserve. However, other operations have been less scrupulous. In the reserve’s core protection area, vast mining operations including the Yunihe iron mine and the Yanshui Spring goldmine have scarred the landscape. In the buffer zone, also technically off-limits, are the Hongshijing goldmine, Baishitan manganese mine and the Daqingshan mining zone.

“These large-scale mines obtained their mining licenses prior to the establishment of the reserve,” a local official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told our reporter. “Since 2009, Xinjiang stopped issuing mining permits within the core protection area. But there are still many private companies with prospecting permits.”

“These mines have had a catastrophic impact on an already fragile ecosystem. But we can do little about the situation,” he added.

According to Shen Lexing, manager of the Yanshui Spring goldmine, his claim produces around 3 grams of gold from one ton of ore. Scaled excavation can produce around 2 kilograms of gold per day, giving his mine an annual output value of 100 million yuan (US$63 million).

“However, net profit is pretty low, since the cost of labor is high in this far-flung region. Electricity and water account for more than 70 percent of our total costs,” he told NewsChina. “Since we are now largely in the prospecting phase, we don’t know if we can obtain mining permits in the future. So far we have no other choice but to continue prospecting until we find high-grade ore.”

Contradictions

In as early as 1997, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region set up its regional-level wild animal reserve in Lop Nur, and had its licenses extended in 2000. In 2003, Lop Nur was upgraded to a national-level nature reserve. However, the management bureau of the Wild Camel Reserve of Lop Nur was not formed until October 2009. There are only 15 full-time employees responsible for managing and patrolling 78,000 square kilometers of prairie.

Before 2009, it was the Xinjiang Regional Land and Resources Bureau that was responsible for issuing mining permits. With the tightening up of environmental protection rules since 2009, any company applying for a mining permit needs to pass an environmental impact assessment before being approved. However, the local hunger for in- vestment often leads officials to overlook or play down the potential environmental impact of large-scale mining operations, making this requirement largely worthless.

In late 2007, the State Council issued a white paper promoting the economic and social development of “economically backward”Xinjiang, emphasizing the importance of prospecting and mining. In 2008, the Ministry of Land and Resources signed an agreement with the Xinjiang regional government on a joint initiative for resource prospecting.

Together, central and local governments invested 4 billion yuan(US$637m) between 2008 and 2015, as well as soliciting 6 billion yuan (US$956m) from the private sector, all of it aimed at massively expanding mining in the region home to some of China’s last pristine wildernesses, and some of the region’s rarest wildlife.

“This policy of promoting mining and prospecting in Xinjiang is not in line with China’s regulations on nature reserves,” said the Lop Nur management official. “As Xinjiang is listed as a strategic natural resource reserve for China, the Lop Nur region is also facing a conflicted situation, torn between environmental protection and resource exploration.”

“We are caught in a dilemma between development and protection,” said Zhang Yu, bureau chief of the Lop Nur reserve. “On the one hand, we cannot afford the high cost of patrolling such a large reserve. On the other, our efforts at preventing exploration and prospecting may earn us the resentment of the local government.”

A similar dilemma is faced by Ruoqiang County government. According to Li Xiaojin, bureau chief of the Ruoqiang County Land and Resources Bureau, the county’s nature reserve area counts for half its total area. “Now there are over 10 mining companies operating inside this protected area, despite the fact that most of them don’t have permits,” said Li. “We need development and we have no other choice. We know environmental protection is necessary, but the problem is how we should deal with those companies that have invested huge money in mineral prospecting.”

Lop Nur Wild Camel Reserve

Looming Readjustment

In recent years, large coal reserves have been found at the heart of the Lop Nur reserve. These include Sha’er Lake and Danan Lake coal reserves. In 2005 and 2008 respectively, authorities in Xinjiang tried twice to lobby the State Council to readjust the borders of the nature reserve to allow mines to open in these areas, however, both attempts received no official response.

In March this year, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection(MEP) dispatched a team to the Lop Nur reserve to conduct field research. This team, according to engineer Zhang Chao, concluded that “the experimentatal zone is to be excluded from the general reserve region.” In his view, this shrinkage will benefit conservationists.“As a matter of fact, the delineated reserve area is unnecessarily large,”he told our reporter.

On August 31, the State Council finally approved the readjustment application submitted by the Wild Camel Reserve. Despite this, the MEP has yet to release a detailed adjustment plan, however it appears that territory will be handed over piecemeal to mining concerns.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines a protection area as “an area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biodiversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means.” Protected areas form the core of conservation efforts around the world. Over the past four decades there has been a tenfold increase in the number of protected areas listed by the UN. Areas under protection have likewise expanded, from 2.4 million square kilometers in 1962 to over 20 million square kilometers in 2004. Roughly 12 percent of the world’s total land resources are now defined as protected, however much of this area remains a playground for commercial interests.

While on paper China boasts 7,000 protected areas nationwide, more than 15 percent of the country’s total sovereign territory, in reality these nature reserves are typically the first to be sold off when profit beckons. A joint report by the EPM and Nanjing Normal University in 2010 found over 40 of 303 national-level nature reserves had been reduced in size, in contravention of central government regulations, to make way for illegal construction projects.

Lack of a Law

With no extant conservation law in China, environmental protection initiatives continue to fail. Environmentalists and even government-appointed conservation officials have little clout in Beijing when faced with the powerful interests in control of mining utilities, construction and tourism. So far, the only official regulation enacted at the national level is a virtually non-binding and almost completely unenforceable Regulation on Nature Reserves, enacted in 1994, which is already viewed as archaic by conservationists.

Since early 2012, the legislative draft of a Natural Heritage Conservation Act has been debated by environmentalists and researchers. This November, according to Xie Yan, associate researcher with the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Act is expected to be presented to the National People’s Congress(NPC) for further discussion.

Xie fears that even if the draft is passed, it will further damage China’s already chaotic system of environmental protection. Xie told NewsChina that of roughly 7,000 protected areas across China, merely 600 would be provided with explicit legal protection by the act, with the rest being effectively abandoned. She is also concerned that the vague language of the act effectively leaves management of such areas at the discretion of local governments usually the most rapacious of developers.

In April this year, Xie set up an organization called the Conservation Law Research Team and, in mid-September, they presented an open letter bearing some 260 signatures, including all seven CAS academicians and all the NPC deputies working in the field of environmental protection, calling for significant improvements to the draft and a speedier resolution to the problem of China’s nonexistent environmental protection law.

“In my view, almost all nature reserves in China except the Wanglang Nature Reserve in the southwestern Sichuan Province are poorly managed,” Xie told our reporter. “Despite there being a management department for each protected area, they lack sufficient financial support from the government. Furthermore, the powers of management and supervision should be separated, otherwise the focus will be shifted towards tourism development and away from protection.”

Xie believes it is the ambiguous role of the management departments which allows them to funnel money into developing tourist resorts and infrastructure projects in supposedly protected areas, permanently destroying entire ecosystems while claiming to protect them. Xie’s team are currently writing up the findings of a nationwide survey of management departments, which they hope will force the government to finally act in the interests of China’s dwindling number of unspoiled nature reserves.

“What we need is a law that effectively covers the full swath of nature conservation, rather than a one that only clarifies non-essential areas,” she said.

“Hopefully, we can change the legislative draft of the Natural Heritage Conservation Act to be submitted to the NPC during its annual session next year,” Xie continued. “Hopefully, a genuinely effective conservation law will come into being and into force in the near future.”