On Wednesday, which was the ninth World Wetlands Day, nine additional wetlands were designated reserves of international importance, known as Ramsar wetlands.

"China's Ramsar wetland sites have increased to 30. They cover 3.43 million hectares and make up 9.4 percent of the country's natural wetland area," said Zhou Shengxian, head of the State Forestry Administration (SFA) at a World Wetlands Day meeting.

Eight of the nine new Ramsar wetlands, located in western China's Qinghai Province, Yunnan Province and Tibet Autonomous Region, are high-altitude marshes and lakes, where the ecosystem is extremely fragile, said Zhou.

The other one, Shuangtai Estuary on the Liaohe River in the northeastern province of Liaoning, is the largest high-altitude reed bed in the country, he said.

China became party to the Ramsar Convention in 1992, vowing to take part in coordinated international action to protect wetlands. The first seven areas were added to the List of Wetlands of International Importance in the same year.

The SFA has set up a Ramsar Convention Implementing Office to take charge of promoting international cooperation in this regard.

All nine wetlands, especially those on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, are headwaters of major rivers, such as the Yangtze, Yellow, Lancang and Yarlung Zangbo rivers, and they are not only the "water tower" for China, but also for Asia, said Lei Guangchun, senior advisor at the Asia-Pacific affairs office of the Switzerland-based Convention on Wetlands.

"Their ecology influences more than 10 billion people's lives in the middle and lower reaches of the rivers," acknowledged Lei.

"Becoming a member of the Ramsar Convention will help the administrators of the wetlands share experience and technologies on wetland protection with other countries and secure more funding," said Lei.

Wetlands, whose natural ecological systems often referred to as the earth's 'kidneys,' play a crucial role in water conservation and the prevention of erosion and flooding.

China presently has 66 million hectares of wetlands, accounting for one-tenth of the world's total. The government has established 353 wetland natural reserves with a combined area of 16 million hectares, covering 40 percent of the country's natural wetlands, according the Ramsar Convention Implementing Office under SFA.

Over the last few decades, however, their area has been shrinking, especially in recent years, noted Lei. This is due to blind exploitation and overuse of wetland biological resources.

To solve this, there should be more effort on repairing wetlands which have suffered destruction, special laws to protect them and greater awareness, especially among government officials, of their importance, said James Harkness, chief representative of the World Wild Fund for Nature in China, which assisted in the designation of the new Ramsar sites.

(Xinhua News Agency February 3, 2005)