On April 25th, I participated Roundtable Meeting of CCICED* in Haikou. The provincial party head Feng Fei, Vice Minister of Ecology and Environment Mr. Zhao Yingmin, and Mdm Mrema of UNEP delivered opening speeches.
Almost all renowned organizations were present. Since I am now a core expert in the Special Policy Study group in the “Biodiversity Conservation and Implementation of Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM GBF)”, I represented on behalf of WWF.
I made two interventions to introduce our achievements and thinking behind them.
In the first intervention, I recommended our Blue Taxonomy in the session of blue economy. This is a tangible tool and the policy makers need to be aware of its existence. I have been introducing this for months, and I hope this taxonomy can be eventually beneficial to the development of sustainable blue economy in China.
I made my second intervention in the KM GBF session where our old friend Marco facilitated. I introduced our exercise in mapping on 30% of biodiversity hotspot in Yellow Sea Ecoregion. I introduced our efforts in building capacity for financial institutes in fishery. And I called for better fishery subsidy reform in China, and introduced our efforts for financial sectors to improve the fishery finance.
The organizer offered a one-hour excursion to Beigang Village (北港村). It is a small fishery island that did not build its freshwater taps until 2015. We heard the story from China Blue (智渔) on how the local communities managed to survive in typhoon, tides and poverty.
There must be some invisible linkage between Haikou and me. I participated in the only World Wetland Day in Haikou in 2019. I was in the panel for Haikou’s renewal as a wetland city (and I witnessed their accreditation in Dubai). This week I had my first CCICED roundtable in Haikou.
Haikou is a beautiful city, but I never had enough time to well explore.
*CCICED: China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development