A mountain to climb
Updated: 2013-01-03 06:54
By Simon Parry(HK Edition)
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Hong Kong students are being signed up for one of the biggest wildlife conservation challenges of the day - the battle to preserve the giant panda from extinction. Simon Parry reports on Hong Kong's role in the mission to save a national icon.
Schoolboys Jonathan Chung and Bobby Yung could have gone to Bali and had daily surfing lessons for their Year 12 project. Instead, they found themselves scrambling up icy mountainsides on the mainland examining the effects of invasive tree species on wild panda habitat.
Their adventure clearly left a deep impression on the 16-year-olds. "I didn't realise pandas were endangered because of the environment," said Jonathan. "I didn't know these trees were invasive and that was harming their habitat. I thought it was hunting that was destroying them."
What most impressed Jonathan and Bobby and the other six students in the party from Hong Kong, however, were the people they encountered in the Wolong Nature Reserve, a wild and beautiful corner of Sichuan province still recovering from the devastating 2008 earthquake.
"The people were so friendly and kind," Jonathan said. "They work together, not against each other. People in Hong Kong always want to compete with each other. These people were in harmony with each other and with nature."
The ability to connect with the rural communities who shape the region is critical to the mission that the Hong Kong students have been enlisted to - the preservation of pandas through the conservation and enhancement of rapidly-disappearing habitat.
The visit was the first of its kind organised by Hong Kong-based charity Friends of Panda Mountain, which is seeking to draw students and businesses from the city into the fight to preserve habitat for the world's last remaining wild pandas. The population is estimated at around 1,600 and a census currently being conducted may find there are fewer still, experts fear.
While a captive breeding program that supplies pandas to zoos around the world is thriving, far less investment has been put into ensuring that the remaining pandas in the wild survive and some conservationists warn they are now on the threshold of extinction.
In a headline-grabbing event in October, a two-year-old captive-bred panda called Tao Tao was released into the wilds of Sichuan - only the second captive-bred panda to be released to the wild. The first died months after his release after apparently being attacked by wild pandas.
But a large question mark remains over whether there is enough suitable habitat in the mountains of Sichuan, the only place where giant pandas still live wild, to allow Tao Tao and the rest of his species to survive.
Before the modernisation of the region, the giant pandas' habitat was an endless stretch of lush bamboo forests stretching from Burma, through Laos and Vietnam and deep into southwest China. Today, the world's last remaining wild pandas are hidden away in small pockets along six mountain ranges flanking the Tibetan plateau.
There are 62 reserves with a combined area of 10,000 square miles. The pockets of land are fragmented and shrinking because of mining and development and some reserves are little more than a kilometer wide.
Experts agree that so-called bamboo corridors are needed to link the pockets of habitat so that pandas can mix and mate and broaden their gene pool, an essential requisite to the survival of the species. But to achieve that, a huge reversal of environmental degradation is required.
The Friends of Panda Mountain charity works with indigenous communities in the Wolong region to encourage the sustainable development of the area to allow its wild panda population to survive.
Jordan West-Pratt, the teacher who led the group of students from Renaissance College in Ma On Shan on the trip to Sichuan in November, said the challenge of restoring the natural habitat of pandas was clearly massive.
The invasive species Japanese larch has taken over huge swathes of the mountainsides, he said. "It is a daunting, daunting task," he said. "I'm not familiar with a program anywhere where an invasive species has been removed. It is really tough."
Rather than oohing and aahing at captive pandas, the students spent most of their time working with the rural communities and that contact was the most valuable part of their experience, said West-Pratt.
"They took Polaroid pictures of villagers who had never had their pictures taken before and gave them to them," he said. "These kids probably have thousands of pictures of themselves so to interact with people who didn't have any was quite something.
"It was a meaningful interaction and a really good opportunity for the kids to reflect on their own privilege."
One day was spent visiting a captive breeding center where pandas are on public show. "All of the students said if you do this trip again, don't bother with that - they said it was a waste of a day. Their verdict was 'More time with people and less time with pandas'," said West-Pratt.
"They really wanted to interact with the community. If they could have had an extra day doing that, they would have preferred it. They said 'We can go and see pandas in a zoo anytime we want'. They enjoyed the time they spent with subsistence farmers much more. They were much more interested in the people.
"One girl said that as a Hong Kong kid she had grown up with stereotypes about the Chinese mainland and the rural area especially. Those preconceptions were totally shattered by this trip. She said 'People are rich in a way we need to be'. It changed the way she felt about rural China. Some of them said they want to go back."
Andrew Thomson, former CEO of the Business Environment Council and now deputy head of Friends of Panda Mountain, said the drive to get Hong Kong more closely involved in the Wolong project was a natural progression from the help given by the city in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake.
"There were lots of projects which took place in the Wolong prefecture so that the whole area has had a lot of investment from the Hong Kong community," he said. "There is a nice synergy there. This (project) will provide an ongoing connection between the two locations."
The need for action to preserve habitat was critical, Thomson said. "There is a severe need to do something in terms of ecological restoration," he said. "If we are going to have an existent population of pandas in the wild then we have got to do work on ecological restoration. It isn't enough just to have a captive population.
"The captive breeding program has been extraordinarily successful. It has achieved its targets and is now a pretty reliable program - but it isn't the same as having a population in the wild.
"There are multiple pressures on the populations in the wild - including the impingement of climate change on bamboo growth. So you have got that pressure, plus the encroachment of man in former panda habitat.
"We want to connect Hong Kong people to the issue. We want to get more people going up there and getting involved in community development projects."
A large part of the work involved steering local communities towards more sustainable activities that preserve panda habitat, he said.
"You have got to get these projects mobilised and give people a reason to stop doing what they have been doing and move on to alternatives," said Thomson. "There is certainly a lot of opportunity around eco-tourism and nature-based tourism.
"The big (government) investment was an infrastructure investment and as that is realised and roads and slopes are improved, it is making the base a tenable base for tourism. After the earthquake it was completely cut off. Splendid isolation is one thing but if you want to engage people you've got to have places to stay."
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wolong reserve. "It is the right time to get things happening in a more material way," said Thomson. "The Renaissance kids were a pioneering party. There are a lot more opportunities to take groups of school children, university students and researchers and to do all sort of projects up there."
In an address to the Royal Geographical Society of Hong Kong in December, Friends of Panda Mountain Founder Marc Brody said: "A growing alliance of institutions and interest groups recognize that forest restoration can help save large blocks of giant panda habitat and maintain biological diversity.
"We have the capability to demonstrate that people can be agents for positive ecological change, and reverse decades of degradation to forests and wild lands for the giant panda.
"By restoring panda habitat at Wolong, Friends is showing that people can be positive ecological change agents. Through restoration ecology we have the knowledge to take concrete steps to improve and restore our world - and this work can begin with the planting of one seedling at a time."
Brody told China Daily the release of Tao Tao to the wild was "a game changer". "We now have a decisive catalyst and a compelling reason to restore habitat," he said. "These remarkably cute captive-bred pandas need a home."
Explaining the significance of involving students, he said: "Today's youth need to be told that their concerns for, and aspirations to help, wildlife matter. Conservationists have a new responsibility to both provide hope to youth and provide opportunities where youth can make meaningful contributions to restore their world."
"By partnering with schools, such as Renaissance College Hong Kong, Friends is giving youth needed opportunities to make meaningful contributions to restore their world."
"We aim to deliver a powerful and inspiring message of hope - that we can improve the environmental conditions of our natural world - and such a message will rally a constituency in Hong Kong, the mainland and abroad to restore panda habitat."
The prospects - like those for Tao Tao after his release into the wild - are uncertain. But Thomson argued: "If you look at animal populations and studies done on all sorts of large mammals around the world, it is possible to provide significant increases in population sizes. There are always success stories so long as you do things in a systematic way."
(HK Edition 01/03/2013 page4)