China's Wetlands Protection Legislative Research

Wetlands are the most rich and natural biological diversity of thelandscape, and is also one of the most important human living environment.There is a variety of ecological value in wetland, for example, degradepollution and improve the quality of the water, reduce flood peak, preventflood disaster, fight drought, conserve biological and genetic diversity, fixcarbon dioxide2and regulate regional climate. The values are prominentcontributions for the survival and development of mankind. However, forthe lack of wetland protection awareness, people just know to ask for butnot protect the wetland, leading to a lot of wetlands are destroyed whichlose basic ecological features, or even serious natural disasters. At present,China's wetland protection only stays in the primary stage. There are no fullrange of protection and management for wetlands ecology. At the nationallevel, there is no special wetland protection legislation. While certain lawsand regulations deal with wetlands, but only stipulate wetland resourceelements based on the purpose of legislation itself, consistent with theeconomic development needs of department. There is a lot of problems inthe internal of legislations, for example, the wetland protection is notcomplete, the ownership of wetlands is not clear, wetland managementissues are confused and so on; there are also some problems in the exteriorof legislations, such as interest conflicts among departments, conflictsbetween wetlands protection and economic development and so on. These issues should be solved by making an unified national legislation. In recentyears, some provinces and municipalities have introduced local wetlandprotection regulations, providing the legal basis for the local wetlandprotection and management. But because of the lack of a unified law, locallegislations were elaborated with a certain amount of randomness. Someprinciple matters are fuzzy, such as the types of wetlands are not complete;the principles of wetland protection are not perfect and so on. Somewetlands protection systems are not precise enough and not operable inpractice. This document is intended to study legislative system of wetlandprotection in China, analyze the main problems in the legislation;recommend formulating the People's Republic of China WetlandProtection Law; establish the protection of the wetlands ecosystem integrityand reasonable development of wetland resources as the purpose oflegislation; establish the overall protection, conservation priority,sustainable development and public participation as4basic principles oflegislation; elaborate10specific wetland protection systems, including thewetland directory system, wetland survey, monitoring, information-sharingsystem, wetland planning system, wetland pollution prevention and controlsystem, wetland ecosystem water protection system, wetland nature reservesystem, wetland ecology restore system, wetland development andutilization license system, payment for the use of wetland and the wetlandecological compensation system; at the same time, stipulate the legalresponsibility. Then i put forward suggestions that modify and enhance thelocal wetland protection legislations. In the process, i suggest highlight theparticularity of local wetland ecosystems, put the wetland protection intothe local land-use planning, strengthen the prevention of local waterpollution and wetlands development impact assessment, encourage localindustrial restructuring, change the way of economic development andabsorb public participation in local wetland ecosystem protection. Theimplement of all these suggestions will promote the local wetlandprotection legislation more operational in practice and enhance wetlandconservation work.