Can Putting A Dollar Value on Ecosystems Help to Protect Them?

This article was originally published on Eco-Business.

“If noted environmentalist Zhiyun Ouyang had his way, more than a third of China’s vast territory would be marked as protected areas where human development is not allowed. In February 2017, China’s government announced that it would require all of its provinces and regions to draw up “ecological red lines” by 2020 to demarcate such protected zones in their territories, as part of an ongoing effort to protect the country’s natural environment and improve its people’s quality of life.

As deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Research Centre for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Ouyang is helping local governments to determine these red lines. “We are helping them to assess their ecosystems’ services and sensitivity, and providing data and maps of China’s most important areas for ecosystem services,” he told Eco-Business in a recent interview.

Based on his research, 35 percent of the country’s land holds its most important wildlife habitats and provides people with key ecosystem services, including water and soil retention, flood mitigation and sandstorm prevention. “Protecting this 35 per cent would maintain the most important areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services,” he said…”

Read on at: Eco-Business.