At the 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Ramsar Convention (COP15) held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe on July 24, nine Chinese places were accredited as International Wetland Cities.
The nine places are Chongming District of Shanghai, Dali in Yunnan Province, Fuzhou in Fujian Province, Hangzhou and Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, Lhasa in Xizang Autonomous Region, Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, Jiujiang in Jiangxi Province, and Yueyang in Hunan Province.
Those places are well known for their large areas of wetlands and efforts to restore and protect wetlands which are critical to biodiversity and climate resilience. In Chongming, 70 percent of its area is wetland, and Hangzhou’s Xixi Wetland Park is China’s first wetland park, which serves as a demonstration project for wetland protection.
Data from the Ministry of Natural Resources shows that China possesses more than 56 million hectares of wetlands, and in the past two decades, China has increased and restored more than 1.1 million hectares of wetlands.
There are 74 International Wetland Cities globally, 22 of which are in China, the most in the world.
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