Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and U.S.-Russia Relations after the Cold War
Rose Gottemoeller uses lessons learned from U.S.-Russia relations during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations to offer insights into how Russia today may be convinced to end its war against Ukraine and resume cooperation for the sake of global security.
Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder
A clear-eyed look from Michael McFaul at how the rise of autocratic China and Russia are compelling some to think that we have entered a new Cold War—and why we must reject that thinking in order to prevail.
The National College Entrance Examination shapes the future of millions of students in China each year, but Hongbin Li and Ruixue Jia illuminate how this test of all tests is also shaping education, labor markets, political legitimacy, and social values beyond the PRC.
Significance
Following severe environmental degradation from rapid economic development, China is now advancing policies to secure biodiversity and ecosystem services. We report the first nationwide assessment, showing that protected areas (PAs) are not well delineated to protect either biodiversity or key ecosystem services. This serious deficiency exists in many countries. We propose creating a national park system in China to help guide development along a path of green growth, improving the well-being of both people and nature. This involves establishing new, strictly protected PAs for biodiversity and ecosystem services that are highly sensitive to human impacts, as well as a new PA category—in China and ideally worldwide—for integrating biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human activities to achieve sustainable development goals.
Abstract
Recent expansion of the scale of human activities poses severe threats to Earth’s life-support systems. Increasingly, protected areas (PAs) are expected to serve dual goals: protect biodiversity and secure ecosystem services. We report a nationwide assessment for China, quantifying the provision of threatened species habitat and four key regulating services—water retention, soil retention, sandstorm prevention, and carbon sequestration—in nature reserves (the primary category of PAs in China). We find that China’s nature reserves serve moderately well for mammals and birds, but not for other major taxa, nor for these key regulating ecosystem services. China’s nature reserves encompass 15.1% of the country’s land surface. They capture 17.9% and 16.4% of the entire habitat area for threatened mammals and birds, but only 13.1% for plants, 10.0% for amphibians, and 8.5% for reptiles. Nature reserves encompass only 10.2–12.5% of the source areas for the four key regulating services. They are concentrated in western China, whereas much threatened species’ habitat and regulating service source areas occur in eastern provinces. Our analysis illuminates a strategy for greatly strengthening PAs, through creating the first comprehensive national park system of China. This would encompass both nature reserves, in which human activities are highly restricted, and a new category of PAs for ecosystem services, in which human activities not impacting key services are permitted. This could close the gap in a politically feasible way. We also propose a new category of PAs globally, for sustaining the provision of ecosystems services and achieving sustainable development goals.
China recently completed its first National Ecosystem Assessment covering the period 2000–2010. Ouyang et al. present the main findings of the assessment. Investment in the restoration and preservation of natural capital has resulted in improvements at the national level in most of the major ecosystem services measured. In particular, food production, carbon sequestration, and soil retention showed strong gains; on the other hand, habitat provision for biodiversity showed a gradual decline. Regional differences remain nonetheless, and there are serious environmental challenges still to be met in areas such as air quality and the wider global footprint of raw material imports.
