As you can see,' comes a cheerful, dis-embodied voice a few metres up ahead in the dense vegetation, 'It's not so easy to spot pandas in this kind of terrain.'

The voice belongs to Jiang Shiwei(蒋仕伟), Deputy Director of the Wanglang National-level Nature Reserve in Sichuan's Pingwu County (平武县王朗国家级自然保护区). After clambering up through more curtains of bamboo we rejoin Jiang and squat against the matted slopes to watch him demonstrate the panda's eating habits. Settling in a thicket, he snaps off a young bamboo stem and grinds it in his teeth.

Pandas, he tells us, spend up to four-teen hours a day eating. They need such long lunches because they digest only a relatively small proportion of what they swallow. Dietary pickiness compounds this nutritional weakness. Although con-stitutionally omnivorous, the bears - for, after much debate, zoologists have now agreed that the panda is indeed a bear of sorts - generally shun meat and most types of vegetation in favour of low-nutrient bamboo. This is a risky staple, because entire bamboo species flower and die off every 30 to 120 years. ¹

The panda is thus an animal whose survival depends on a high degree of habitat integrity, which makes it a fitting emblem for a conservation organisation. But its chances of survival will be reduced if it is hemmed into ever smaller protected areas, unable to access new food sources and new breeding partners.

It is some consolation for active con-servationists that every panda has a unique bite, and leaves a unique 'jawprint' on the undigested bamboo that appears in its 'droppings'. This makes it relatively easy to track individuals, and for Jiang and his colleagues to determine that Wanglang is home to around 30 pandas.

Half a dozen park rangers regularly scale the high mountains and deep gorges of the 32,000 hectare reserve, trekking along 24 transects to monitor habitat condition, collect samples of the forest plant community and record signs and sightings - not just of pandas but also of takin, musk deer, black bear, snub-nosed monkeys and birds. Routine data collection provides the basis for improved understanding and management of the area's ecology. Several research institutes also now use Wanglang as a base for scientific fieldwork.

All of which sounds like no more than what one would expect of a nature reserve with rare and rich resources of biodiversity. But, in China, Wanglang is very much the exception rather than the rule. 'There are over 1,000 reserves' (including all those designated by national, provincial and county authorities), points out WWF Species Programme Communication Co-ordinator, Li Ning (李宁), 'but in the past people who worked in them had not necessarily learned about nature manage-ment because the job was thought to be mainly about fire prevention, and the attitude was that anyone could do that.' The skills deficit was matched by lack of funds. 'Only basic salaries were paid by government', says Species Programme Director, Yu Changqing (于长青), so there was no incentive to do anything, no allowances, no equipment.' Reserve staff might spend their time playing mah jong. The more enterprising often set out to top up their wages by exploiting the very resources they were supposed to protect. ²

In other areas of China, such as the tropical rain forests of southern Yunnan, WWF has in the past provided equipment, training and financial support to enable nature reserves to function more effect-ively. Wanglang too has received such assistance over the last five years, but as part of a programme that has also striven to connect with communities and govern-ment agencies beyond the reserve's perimeter. WWF's most recent strategy is wider still, aiming not just to protect isolated islands of biodiversity, but to ensure that there are green 'corridors' between them and, yet more ambitiously, to improve natural resource planning and management across whole eco-regions: in this case, the Minshan (岷山) mountain range that lies between the Tibetan plateau and the sub-tropical plain to the east, covering 3.3 million hectares and the greater part of six counties in Sichuan and one in Gansu.

Changing threats to forest habitats

In late 1997, WWF embarked on an 'int-egrated conservation and development programme (ICDP)' in Pingwu County, which included support for the Wanglang reserve. At that time, commercial logging in the county presented, as Yu Changqing puts it, 'a very challenging conflict between conservation and development'. Local people, he says, 'disliked logging, because they recognized that it increased flooding'; but it also provided local employment and fully 60% of the county government revenue.

The floods of 1998, and the logging ban declared by Premier Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基) changed all that. Ostensibly a reprieve for nature, the closure of the logging companies nonetheless created new kinds of pressure. Livelihood options for those who lost jobs in the logging industry included the poaching of wild animals and unsustainable harvesting of 'non-timber forest products' such as plants for use in traditional Chinese medicine.

Trade in panda skins has been largely deterred by stiff penalties and the difficulty of finding buyers. (Nonetheless, several culprits have, in recent years, been apprehended trying to sell skins). But it is harder to control trade in the products of other animals - meat, fur or, in the case of the hapless musk deer, intestinal sec-retions. Traps aimed at one species inevitably also threaten others.

Medicinal plants offer the possibility of a steady income. WWF China's Forest Programme Director, Zhu Chunquan (朱春全) estimates that a competent gatherer can earn more than CNY 200 a day from harvesting wild plants: 'If they stay in the hills for half a month they might make as much as CNY 10,000.'

According to his colleague, Ling Lin (凌林), who oversees WWF's forest pro-tection efforts in the upper Yangtze, 'There is a huge market for traditional Chinese medicine. The government is setting up big manufacturers in southwest China, especially Chengdu. We have to find ways to make this environment- friendly. It's a major issue after the logging ban.' During the SARS epidemic earlier this year, he adds, when demand for medicinal products soared and other work opportunities shrank, 'everyone went to the forest'.

Under the auspices of the ICDP, Wanglang started anti-poaching patrols, in tandem with routine monitoring of the reserve's flora and fauna. These succeeded to the extent that some culprits were caught: over sixty illegal gatherers of plants in the early months of this year alone, according to Zhu Chunquan. But, he adds, the 'success' was equivocal and strictly localised. For it soon became apparent that increased vigilance in Wanglang was merely 'pushing poachers into other areas,' and so having little net impact on species conservation. Wanglang has therefore suspended anti-poaching patrols, in favour of a more coordinated and holistic approach across the Minshan area.

The Pingwu ICDP did not, however, rely exclusively, or even mainly, on re-strictive measures. Major objectives were to work with the county government to identify new patterns of local development as an alternative to dependence on logging; and, at micro-level, to support community development in villages adjacent to the reserve, taking pressure off the natural resource base by promoting alternative livelihoods. Success in this, says Wanglang Vice Director Jiang, can be inferred from the fact that none of those apprehended for poaching or gathering over the last two years were from communities near the reserve.

If you can't chop it down . . .

With the logging ban in place, Pingwu County officials soon turned their thoughts to tourism as an alternative income stream. The famed national park in neighbouring Jiuzhaigou County (九寨沟县) presented a tantalising vision of the possibilities. A major attraction for Chinese tourists, Jiuzhaigou draws more than a million visitors a year, each paying CNY 230 (USD 28) to enter the reserve. This is the single greatest source of local government revenue, which amounted to CNY 28.2 million (USD 3.4 million) in 2000, for a county with a population of just 57,000. Pingwu, in the same year, had a revenue of CNY 14.2 million (USD 1.7 million) to provide services for a population of 187,000 -- more than three times greater. ³

Chinese tourists tend to flock together, and Jiuzhaigou's scenic charms are reck-oned to be truly exceptional, so Pingwu was never likely to seriously rival its more celebrated neighbour. But Wanglang and other reserves in the county are certainly impressive, and the county seat is a pleasant, relaxed town of 17,000, with very little motor traffic, little of the tawdriness that generally accompanies fast-forward growth in urban China, and, as yet, no conspicuous signs of prostitution. The county therefore had a fair chance of picking up some passing trade from tour buses heading to Jiuzhaigou, and also for attracting more discerning visitors who want to stray at least some way off the beaten track.

WWF was in a difficult position. It had arranged sessions for local officials to 'brainstorm' new development strategies, and tourism was what they came up with. But, says, Li Ning, who was involved in the programme from the beginning, 'When we talk about development, government thinks about big development, so this is a problem we have to face. In 1998, we did a feasibility study, then a training on "What is eco-tourism?" and then we had discussions with government with a particular focus on Wanglang and Baima [白马, the closest community to the reserve]. We were very clear that small-scale but high quality tourism should be promoted. Yet to replace the 60% revenue loss from logging, it was understandable that they were thinking about something bigger . . .'

'Something bigger' clearly runs the risk of destroying both the charms and the substance of what visitors come to see. The tour coaches that spin around Jiuzhaigou further divide and isolate any animal populations that remain within it. In a depressing instance of job creation, as many as 120 people work at picking up litter jettisoned by the tourists. And some of the tourists bring other nasty habits: they want to eat 'wild meat' and take away other animal and plant products. This generates local employment, but of a distinctly destructive kind.

Part of WWF's job in Pingwu, there-ore, was to restrain the worst impulses of officials. These included one hare-brained scheme (now shelved) to drive a scenic railroad from the county town to Jiuzhaigou, cutting right through the core area of the Wanglang reserve.

To demonstrate a gentler approach - and also to generate income for conser-vation within Wanglang - WWF financed the builiding of an 'eco-lodge' in the heart of the reserve. 'We can't compete with Jiuzhaigou for scenery, so need to compete by enriching the content of the tourism activity' says Jiang Shiwei; and the lodge was part of the strategy to achieve this. Nestled on the lower slopes of the reserve's main valley, the dozen or so rooms are constructed in wood, with an outside terrace, dining and meeting rooms and an open fire in the library. It's a good place to see the stars and to think.

The lodge was intended for those with a serious interest in nature - and the money to pursue it. In the two years since the building was completed, it has hosted select groups identified by a British tour agency, Discovery Initiatives. Jiang Shiwei and his colleagues are available to act as guides, both within the reserve and on visits to adjacent communities. On top of payment for the tour, members of the groups make a personal donation to the reserve.

But, says Jiang, this effort at low-volume, high-value tourism has come under strain from one of the main stake-holders in the enterprise: the terminally shy panda. The tourists never see one; and, having spent several thousand dollars on the trip, even the most patient nature lovers are disappointed to spot no more than a pile of panda shit. Reserve staff cannot help out here: after several years working in Wanglang, and regularly monitoring the faecal trail, Jiang himself has never seen a panda in the wild either.

With high-income international tour-ism beginning to look less feasible, the Wanglang management now hopes instead to attract Chinese visitors to the lodge. This would go some way to meeting the charge that it is unfair for privileged foreigners to enjoy the prime slice of Chinese nature tourism - but the emphasis will definitely remain on 'low quantity, high quality'. Mass tourism, says Jiang, is not on the agenda.

Wanglang had around 20,000 visitors in 2002, up from no more than 1,000 a few years ago. The great majority are day trippers, each paying an entrance fee of CNY 30 (USD 3.7). Unlike many reserves, Wanglang is allowed by the local govern-ment to keep most of the money taken at the gate (a fact that Fan Longqing [·????ì], who leads WWF's species conservation efforts in Minshan, attributes to WWF's influence.) Jiang Shiwei believes that a sustainable ceiling for visitors would be around 30,000 per year - enough to fund conservation work and provide a modest surplus for the county government without disrupting the habitat.

While wanting to limit the number of visitors, Jiang also sees the need to educate them. A modest exhibition at the main gate sets out basic information on local natural history and ecology, and there are plans to improve and extend this. Sign-boards at a few main sites within the reserve also supply information to help visitors understand what they are looking at. Recently established near the eco-lodge, with financial and technical support from WWF, are two interpretive trails: way-marked walks of just a few kilometres, with simple but robust engineering (wooden steps, handrails, bridges and viewpoint platforms) to aid progress along more difficult parts of the track. Infor-mation boards with 'interactive' elements ('Lift the flap to find the answer' etc) draw attention to significant features along the way. It's the stuff of interpretive trails across the developed world; and it is well done.

For WWF, the point of this is not to make Wanglang a more attractive or sat-isfying draw for tourists so much as to demonstrate an approach that enriches people's appreciation of and sensitivity to the places they visit. This will be a key message of future efforts to influence tourism management across the region.

Endangered minorities

Baima township, eighteen kilometres outside the reserve on the road back to the county seat, has meanwhile been exper-iencing a tourism boom.

The township is one of the few remaining population niches for the Baima Zangzu (白马藏族) ethnic minority, which numbers only around 15,000 in total, distributed between Pingwu, Jiuzhaigou and Gansu's Wen County( 文县 ).⁴

Over the last four years, Baima's handful of villages have become the centre of a thriving bed and breakfast industry. In Yazhezaozu village (亚者造祖 ), which has a population of just 590 people in 130 households, we found no less than 13 guesthouses in operation, with another seven under construction. These are all family businesses in private homes, but they are a far cry from familyzimmerfrei on the Rhine or farmhouse bed and break-fasts in the English Lakes. For, according to village Party Secretary, Yin Zhu (银珠), each of the courtyard homes, in effect small hotels, can accommodate 30-40 guests. On high days and a holidays, he says, the village hosts as many as 500 overnight visitors. When work is complete on the latest conversions, Yazhezaozu will be able to accommodate more visitors than residents.

The hotels charge CNY 40-50 per night. This includes breakfast and, if numbers permit, an evening song and dance session, for which the hoteliers hire freelance performers (CNY 10 for a dancer, CNY 5 for a singer). Other attractions include horse riding, strolling by the river (for, although not formally protected, the scenery here is fine enough), and day trips to Wanglang.

Most visitors come in groups organ-ised by tour agencies in the city of Mianyang (绵阳), administrative centre of the prefecture that embraces Pingwu. According to Party Secretary Yin, many have become regulars, returning once a month or so.

The boom began, says Yin, when in 1998 the Pingwu Leading Group for Tourism and the Mianyang Prefecture Tourist Bureau visited and encouraged villagers to take in guests, offering help with marketing. Two households gave it a try. Their success was such that others promptly followed suit, often travelling to Mianyang themselves to fix deals with tour operators, and borrowing cash to invest in dormitory and dining room extensions that are built in conspicuously 'traditional' style but also sport satellite dishes. Brightly coloured signs along the main village street now vie to offer rooms and home cooking. Down by the river, small boys charge up to offer horses.

As part of its integrated programme in Pingwu, WWF has tried to engage con-structively with this tourism industry, although the sheer pace of its growth has proved daunting. Li Ning, who worked on the programme when it began, confesses that 'Going back has not been easy. I didn't want to see what I saw: the big and loud buildings . . . But when [local people] see a benefit, they will naturally follow it.'

Jiang Shiwei does not conceal his relief that such development has been kept out of Wanglang. The reserve's eco-lodge, he stresses, is priced to deter the casual tourist who just wants to 'play' in the countryside. But he acknowledges the right of city dwellers to come out to play, and of local people to cash in on this.

It is easy enough to bemoan the loss of tradition and the objectification of 'exotic' ethnic minorities inherent in much tourist development - especially when, as so often, indigenous people are among the last to derive any economic benefit. But in Baima it does appear to be the villagers themselves who have mobilised their assets - their ethnicity and their proximity to relatively unspoilt nature - to turn a profit.

This may not be 'eco tourism', but WWF has worked to make it at least a shade greener. Environmental education activities in local schools were followed up with training workshops for tour operat-ors, guides and family businesses catering to tourists. These stakeholders are seen as critical allies in promoting more resp-onsible and sustainable tourism. The workshops were designed to provide participants with the knowledge and space for reflection to become informal educat-ors of their customers and more effective stewards of the environment from which they make a living.

WWF has also worked with the Baima communities to resolve local 'stakeholder conflicts' that arose in the growing tourist trade. Ling Lin cites the example of a dis-pute between households over the supply of horses for trekking. This was settled by an agreement whereby different hamlets now take it in turns to supply the horses. Fixed routes and prices were also agreed and, to avoid over-charging, displayed on a board by the river in Yazhezaozu. WWF's role, says Ling, was 'to provide a platform where they can discuss and come up with their own regulations.'

At the same time, WWF's integrated project set out to strengthen the live-lihoods of poorer households that could not invest in hotels or restaurants. Party Secretary Yin was, perhaps surprisingly, among the less affluent villagers. He keeps bees to supplement his income from farming, and attended a technical training course that WWF organised for a group of local bee-keepers. From this, says Yin, he learned how to protect the bees more effectively during the winter, and has since had much better survival rates; although marketing his increased honey yields has been problematic.

Fan Longqing recognises the problem and sees room for more support in packaging and marketing products in ways that appeal to domestic tourists. Honey, he jokes, is the perfect 'non-timber forest product' because the beekeepers are kept 'too busy to go to the forest' to extract other products. Ling Lin adds that in future WWF would like to encourage a shift towards cultivation, rather than gathering from the wild, of other 'non-timber' products such as mushrooms and medicinal plants.

Marketing has also proved a headache for Bo Lanzao (波兰早), the poorest villager we met in Yazhezaozu. Her husband was disabled in an accident several years ago, leaving her as the main breadwinner for their three children. She and several other women received loans from the WWF project to set themselves up embroidering handicrafts, incorpor-ating motifs from their traditional dress into bags and other items for tourist consumption. But, says Bo, other sellers restrict her access to the prime turf at the main entrance to the village so she has few opportunities to sell to tourists. Despite this 'stakeholder conflict', she has made money from the scheme; but, she says, did not repay the loan because she needed the cash for school fees. 'A man from Wanglang' helped her out, she told us, by bringing guests at the eco-lodge to see her wares. This led to a foreigner arranging to sponsor her son through high school. He will soon be earning, so light is visible at the end of the tunnel.

Towards a 'landscape approach'

WWF will draw on these experiences, both positive and negative, as it looks beyond Pingwu to the wider Minshan area.

The 'landscape approach' that the organisation is developing is not a mere 'scaling up' so much as an attempt to make entire ecological regions the unit for analysis and action - taking the cue from nature, as it were, rather than from human systems. This inevitably entails cutting across existing administrative as well as institutional boundaries.

To a large extent this reflects a change in WWF's operations worldwide. To focus their future efforts, in 1998 the members of the international WWF family together took a long look at the world, debated and argued over the ecological data, and came up with 200 eco-regions as global priorities for biodiversity conservation.

One of the regions so defined was the 'Forests of the Upper Yangtze'. This itself is a huge area; but a further ecological mapping and assessment process iden-tified Minshan as a critical sub-region, in terms of both existing biodiversity and environmental and social stress. Em-bracing some of the world's richest remaining temperate forest eco-systems, it is home to numerous rare species and around a million people, mostly poor, including ethnic Tibetans, Qiang (羌族) and several other minorities.

WWF China is describing the period until 2005 as an information gathering and planning phase for future work across Minshan (and, indeed, the entire Upper Yangtze), but some specific activities are meanwhile continuing, building outwards on the experience of Pingwu.

Minshan's sixteen nature reserves and protected areas are being encouraged to form a conservation network. Staff from Wanglang are already providing counter-parts in neighbouring reserves with hands-on training and technical support in the monitoring skills they have acquired. WWF support for closer collaboration between reserves will, says Fan Longqing, also stress the critical importance of including local communities in conserv-ation planning.

Also under way are discussions about how best to protect a wildlife 'corridor' linking important protected areas in Sichuan and Gansu. Habitats have been fragmented by a Jiuzhaigou ring road built for tourist traffic; WWF is working with the forestry departments and reserve authorities on a 'corridor management plan', the most ambitious variation of which would replace key sections of the road with tunnels.

Tourism will remain an important area of engagement. Already, a consultant has been hired to produce a study of the industry in Jiuzhaigou, and this will be followed up with a tourism planning workshop in the county. A new opp-ortunity has appeared with the recent creation of a tourism department within the Sichuan Forestry Bureau. Ling Lin warns darkly that 'They use the term "eco-tourism" but in fact they just want to bring more people into the forests to replace income from logging.' All the more reason, he says, to help the Forestry Department develop tourist guidelines and zoning approaches that allow mass tourism development in some areas but restricts access to others.

Other plans include studies of natural regeneration of forest cover as an alter-native to existing practice in reforestation and sloping land conversion programmes.

Further work on sustainable liveli-hoods is expected to include more support for bee keeping and experiments with commercial cultivation (rather than wild harvesting) of medicinal plants such as caterpillar fungus. (虫草).

But in the main the Minshan initiative is not yet a programme so much as an idea and an approach, with collaborative stake-holder planning and management the keynote - indeed, a kind of mantra that was repeated, with variations, by all the WWF staff we spoke to.

Zhu Chunquan's summary is typical: 'WWF's advantage is not funds or staff but new methodologies, getting people to sit together for the first time to discuss these issues, and training local experts so that they can do the analysis and make the decisions themselves . . . Our aim is to first provide the background information, and then to provide the mechanism for negotiation between all the sectors: mining, transportation, agriculture, forestry, and local communities. But this is a dynamic learning process, not pre-designed with fixed partners. If we find new partners, we will work them.'

Report byNick Young. A parallel report written by Fu Tao(付涛) appears in our Chinese language edition.

¹See the (WWF) www.panda.org site for more panda habits.
²WWF China’s current Representative, Jim Harkness, discussed flaws in China’s nature reserve system in Recent Trends in Forestry and Conservation of Biodiversity in China in China Quarterly, Winter 1998.
³These figures were supplied in telephone interviews with Sichuan Statistical Bureau and the Jiuzhaigou Finance Department.
⁴Not officially recognised as a distinct minority in China, these people are normally computed as part of the 'Tibetan' (zangzu) population, but refer to themselves as Bei ( 贝 )and, according to Chinese and foreign scholars, are descendants of another, now extinct, ethnic group, the Di (氐人 )