Tracking area loss of China’s Nature Reserves from 2003 to 2015

Establishing protected areas (PAs) is one of the most important strategies for biodiversity conservation. Up to 2019, the global network of PAs covers approximately 15% of land and inland water globally and 7.3% of oceans. However, legal changes of PAs, such as downgrading, downsizing and degazettement, have been increasing in recent years, making the future of PAs uncertain. China is one of the most important countries for the conservation of biodiversity and nature resources. Nature reserve (NR), as China’s primary strategy for biodiversity conservation, its area has greatly expanded since 1956 when the first one was established, but slightly decreased after 2007, implying that downsizing or degazettement of NRs would be a widely-existed problem over the past decade. In this study, based on the list of NRs from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China, the information of downsizing and degazettement from 2003 to 2015 was retrieved and analyzed. Results showed that 591 NRs were downsized (21.86 million hectares, 14.88% of total area in 2015) and 389 were degazetted (3.64 million hectares, 2.42% of total area in 2015) during this period, and local level NRs with smaller area had higher possibilities to be downsized or degazetted. No degazettement event occurred in national NRs, nevertheless, its area loss caused by downsizing was relatively large. The causes for downsizing and degazettement are complicated and land exploitation is the primary motive. We suggest that various management strategies should be created for different types and different levels of NRs to control downsizing and degazettement.