East Asian conservation officials and academics gathered at Yangmingshan National Park this past week to exchange ideas on management and use of national protection areas, including national parks. The theme, "Benefits Beyond Boundaries in East Asia," is particularly apt for Taiwan, which shares marine boundaries with neighboring nations and is dealing with its own redefinition of "boundaries" within the government departments that manage Taiwan's preservation areas.
This was the fourth World Commission on Protected Areas in East Asia (WCPA-EA) conference since 1993. The first three were held in Beijing, Kushiro, Japan and Seoul. More than 300 participants from the region attended the Yangmingshan conference, which also is counted among the major cross-strait exchange events of the year, with 50 delegates from China in attendance. In addition, participation by delegates from both North and South Korea underscored the conference's "beyond boundaries" theme.
PHOTO: CHEN MING-MING
David Sheppard, the head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Program on Protected Areas, explained that the conferences are, "about trying to break down barriers and increasing cooperation." Sheppard was in Yangmingshan promoting the 2003 World Parks Congress (to be held in Durban, South Africa), for which he will serve as secretary general, and which is also themed "Benefits Beyond Boundaries." The conference serves as a venue for exchanging ideas, and as a launching pad for further exchanges.
PHOTO: CHEN MING-MING
Taiwan's protected areas
Chang Lung-Sheng (
The late 1990s saw a leveling off of park planning in Taiwan, after Shei-Pa and Kinmen national parks were established in 1992 and 1995 respectively. (Taiwan's other national parks are Yangmingshan, Yushan, and Taroko. It is expected that Makao Chinese Cypress National Park (
"There is next to no enforcement of conservation measures in Taiwan's nature and forest reserves due largely to a lack of monitoring. The only natural places in Taiwan where there is effective monitoring and a law (the National Park Law) backing up the principles of conservation are national parks," says Chang who advocates a systematic overhaul of the current fragmented management regime. Chang also notes that national scenic areas managed by the Tourism Bureau are set up purely for recreation with little or no interpretive features, and no effort at conservation.
Marine conservation under-represented
While Taiwan and its neighbors have made impressive advances in establishment and management of terrestrial conservation areas, they have paid scant attention to protection of marine habitats. As Academia Sinica Institute of Zoology Director Shao Kwang-Tsao (
Shao points out that the government says it has designated certain marine areas for protection, but that there is no enforcement in those areas. "Furthermore, we would like to designate Pratas Island (東沙) and its reefs as a protected area, but we're hearing that the central government is considering allowing this area to be managed by the Kaohsiung City Government, which has proposed developing it as a tourism recreation area," says Shao dispiritedly. "That's not a good thing for a reef area that has already been practically destroyed." The conference reached a consensus on the issue, and Shao is hopeful the intervention of influential sympathizers, such as Academia Sinica President (and presidential advisor) Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲), will help make substantial coastal and marine conservation a reality.
Recent calls for the establishment of an agency devoted to managing protection areas have coincided with the latest government initiative to streamline government operations. According to Chinese Culture University department of landscape architecture Associate Professor Monica Kuo (郭瓊瑩), a proposal to integrate management under one government agency is currently being considered by the Executive Yuan's Research, Development and Evaluation Commission. The framework would see the creation of a Cabinet-level Ministry of Environment and Resources and four subordinate bureaus to manage water resources, forests, national parks and irrigation.
The reorganization proposal has been around in one form or another for at least 10 years, according to Kuo, and while rearranging ministry departments to form an integrated conservation management ministry may sound good on paper, existing ministries count the loss of such departments in terms of a diminution of their budgets, and of their prestige, and have argued hard against the new order.
Mountain conservation
The need for an integrated protective area management agency is highlighted by the establishment of the Central Mountain Ecological Conservation Corridor, an ambitious project that links up 14 protected areas in Taiwan's Central Mountain Range. Globally, the establishment of ecological corridors is now recognized as essential to maintaining biodiversity, but the enterprise is a very challenging one. Alpine areas in the central range are generally inaccessible, and therefore very amenable to conservation, but the areas that link up the corridor are in lower-lying areas.
The greatest challenge is posed by the transition areas between sub-tropical and temperate zones between 800m and 1,500m above sea level. These are manifestly exploitable areas that serve as home to a wide variety of plants and animals, not to mention humans. In addition, any roads that might be built in central region will most likely be routed through these transitional zones, thus compromising the corridor's role in the promotion of biodiversity.
The often conflicting interests of the various government agencies that currently manage the area's resources make integrated planning difficult. Even with integration, however, challenges remain. The area is prone to natural disasters, and authorities will have to find a way to work with the many aboriginal people that make the area their home, often cultivating crops, such as betel nut, that reduce biodiversity and may lead to increased susceptibility to natural disasters.
The conference featured several presentations by Taiwanese delegates on sensitivity to aboriginal issues, and it appears that some progress is being made on this front. Taroko National Park Superintendent Yeh Shih-wen (
Benefits of boundaries
Any biology student could tell you that boundaries are crucial to biodiversity. The existence of geographical barriers is an important mechanism for speciation (the emergence of different species of cats, for example, or primates). And yet, boundaries can also be impediments to diversity. This is the paradox encapsulated in the WCPA-EA conference's theme.
The paradox can perhaps best be illustrated by the example of a road that humans build to get from point A to B, which also happens to be a formidable barrier for many plant and animal species. In the same way, globalization is generally seen as a process that does away with barriers, "but in this process the very infrastructure that allows global transportation and communication to proceed is carving up new boundaries that are leaving many of the world's species isolated on `islands' of ever-decreasing size," says Lund University (Sweden) Department of Social and Economic Geography Professor Eric Clark.
The trick for conservation planners seeking to fortify biodiversity in areas under their stewardship is to identify which boundaries are helping their cause, while eliminating those that work against it, whether this involves breaking up a road that disrupts the natural proliferation of indigenous species, establishing an ecological conservation corridor, restructuring a fragmented administrative regime, or breaking down communication barriers to better cooperate with colleagues facing similar problems in a very different locality.
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