Yunnan Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau

　Specific organization for environmental protection in Yunnan has been set up since 70’s.

　As one of line agencies of Yunnan Provincial Government, Yunnan Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau is responsible for overall supervision and management of environmental protection work in Yunnan. Local environmental protection bureaus in 16 prefectures / cities and 90 counties/districts have been established.

　And now, there are 3,000 managerial staff and researchers working in the area of environmental protection, of which 1,700 are technical persons and 20 are entitled to governmental special allowance. 90 environmental monitoring stations at different level, 1 environmental supervision and law enforcement team and 102 environmental supervision and management offices were set up. An integrated system composed of environmental management, monitoring, scientific research, dissemination and education, radioactivity prevention and supervision, environmental industry development, rare wildlife species breeding, nature reserve development, etc.

The brief introduction to Yunnan Province's characteristic

　Yunnan, located in the Southwest of China. Its pivotal land that links the Asian hinterland and the South Asia sub-continent and the Indo-Chinese Peninsular, is a plateau mountainous province. It is a place where multinationalities, diversified organisms and landforms coexisted.

　It is a mysterious land endowed with extremely wonderful social development phenomena and complex diversified ecosystem, rustic folk style, multinational culture, natural resources, primeval ecological environment.

　Reputed as "Kingdom of Flora and Fauna", the "Kingdom of Non-ferrous Metals", "Gene Bank for Biological Species", Yunnan is regarded as a giant natural museum that attracts thousands of people who devoted in natural to visit. However, the irrational exploring of resource plus the natural factors have made its ecological environment to be fragile. In general, ecological environment in Yunnan province is stable, but the serious situation of continued ecological environment deterioration in parts of the Province is not yet effectively retarded. We shoulder heavy responsibilities and have no times to delay to take immediate actions to protect environment and conserve ecology.

Environmental Characteristics in Yunnan Province

It is a mountainous and frontier province located in the Southeast China. 94% of its total area is hilly and mountainous, thus upland eco-system is its major ones.

It has many high plateau lakes, among those 46 lakes are of the area above 5 km². The lake basins are the most developed regions, but suffering most frequent human interventions and serious environmental problems.

It is endowed with diverse ecotypes and riches in biodiversity, which is very unique but rather fragile for low population and fragmented habitats.

It lies at the upper streams of some important rivers. Among which, there are six biggest river systems namely Lan Cangjiang River (the upper-stream of Mekong River), Nu Jiang River (the upper-stream of Salween River), Irrawaddy River, Yuan Jiang River (the upper-stream of Red River), Jin Sha Jiang River (the upper-stream of Yangtze River), Nan Pang Jiang River (the upper-stream of Pearl River), of which 4 are international rivers.

Local economy lags far behind and poverty coverage is intensive. But the waste of resources and the pollution are serious for its dominating resource-extensive style of economic development at current stage.

It has plenty of ethnic groups, of which the cultures have some positive understandings about and close linkages with the conservation and utilization of natural resources.

Topic Name: The Biodiversity Conservation in Yunnan