Shant Raj Jnawali marked World Volunteer Day on Tuesday by taking a group of Chinese schoolchildren to a wetland conservation project in a small county on the China-Russia border.

 

"This is the most beautiful wetland I've seen since crossing the Himalayas," said the 46-year-old Nepali biodiversity specialist, referring to the Sanjiang wetland in the conflux of Heilongjiang and Wusuli rivers in Fuyuan, a county with 100,000 people in the far east of China.

 

"Look at the animals' footprints," Jnawali waved to a group of 24 children trekking on the ice. "They're part of the entire biosystem."

 

Jnawali knew the wetland at Fuyuan was endangered before he came to the area three months ago as a UN volunteer for the Sanjiang project. "The locals say the wetland used to produce loads of birds' eggs and fishes."

 

When China suffered severe food shortages in the 1950s and 1960s, the wetland made way for farmland and produced ample grain to feed the nation. The area has been known as the country's largest granary ever since.

 

But encroaching farmland and other human activities in the past decades have caused a sharp decline in the population of wetland birds and animals, though the 190,000-hectare wetland remains Asia's largest.

 

"It's a pity your generation will never be able to catch as many fish and find as many birds' eggs as your grandparents did. That is a lesson about breaking the laws of Nature. I hope your generation won't repeat the mistake," he said.

 

Jnawali, a Norway-trained PhD graduate with 17 years of research experience in worldwide wetland biodiversity, became a UN volunteer last year to implement the Sanjiang project. He left his Katmandu home three months ago and came to Fuyuan, 650 kilometers from Heilongjiang's provincial capital Harbin.

 

Jnawali and his Chinese colleague Zhu Baoguang will spend at least one year promoting wetland conservation knowledge to schools, local businesses and communities.

 

"As UN volunteers our main mission is to take people to field trips and build awareness about the importance of conserving the wetlands," said Zhu, the Chinese coordinator for the Sanjiang project.

 

The two volunteers have advised the local government in Fuyuan to be more rational in developing eco-friendly tourism and encourage farmers to increase their incomes by growing high-yield and profitable organic food instead of just expanding their cropland.

 

At the end of their field trip, the 24 teenagers vowed to promote wetland conservation among their peers and in communities.

 

Qin Yan, a senior student at Fuyuan No. 2 High School, said, "My parents grow at least 10 hectares of soybeans next to the wetland. That forms the bulk of our family income. But I never knew we owed the bumper harvest to the wetland."

 

The 16-year-old girl said in future she would talk others out of expanding their cropland into the wetland.

 

Sanjiang is one of the four UN-sponsored wetland conservation projects in China, the other three being around Dongting Lake in the central Hunan Province, Yancheng in the eastern Jiangsu Province and on the border of the western Sichuan and Gansu provinces.

 

The United Nations has sent nine volunteers to implement the four wetland projects in China.

 

According to UN volunteer project officer John Floretta, the United Nations Development Program and the WWF have worked with China's State Forestry Administration in wetland biodiversity conservation to invest a total of US$11.7 million.

 

A recent UN Human Development Report issued in November warned that China must do more to preserve the waterways and the fragile ecosystems of its northern areas.

 

(Xinhua News Agency December 6, 2006)