At a national wetland reserve in Fujian, the lower tides of winter expose large expanses of mudflat. Migratory birds peck for food while villagers hurry to harvest razor clams before the sea returns.
For the rangers responsible for patrolling the wetlands and dissuading people from harmful behaviour, this is the tensest time of day. The birds need peace and quiet to feed and rest, but the villagers need to make a living.
Here, for the few hours the tide is out, these two needs come into conflict in the Minjiang estuary wetland national nature park.
There’s a very different scene in far-off south-west Guangxi, at the Beilun estuary national park. There, a luxuriant mangrove swamp is surrounded by shrimp ponds, greenhouses and oyster rafts.
As the tide comes in and out, signs of that industry flow into the park. Foam floats get trapped in eddies; patches of algal green water indicate eutrophication.
In 2022, 196 countries agreed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, committing to effectively protect 30% of the planet’s land and 30% of its ocean and coastal areas by 2030. In late October, countries will meet in Armenia in part to check progress on that “30×30” goal at the UN’s annual Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17).
For China, there are two challenges. It doesn’t yet have the local capacity to properly manage its marine protected areas (MPAs), and the same areas are often used for conflicting activities such as aquaculture.
These challenges are not unique. In Spain’s bay of Cádiz natural park, only 25 shellfish harvesting licences have been issued, but over 1,000 people are believed to harvest regardless.
To find out more, I visited the Beilun and Minjiang estuary national parks and spoke to locals, officials and experts. I found that reaching conservation targets means achieving a tricky balance. Both local conservation officials and the local people who rely on the sea for their livelihoods must be considered. To complicate matters, these two groups often know each other personally.
Names have been removed to protect those interviewed.
How far to go?
China has been steadily marking out MPAs. In 2024, a white paper said the country had 352 marine protected areas, covering 93,300 sq km.
How far that goes towards the 30×30 target depends on how you classify both the reserves and the country’s total maritime area. In 2021, a team from Stony Brook University found that China was protecting 10% of its marine areas if fishery conservation zones were included. A 2024 study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, however, found “sea-related” protected areas covered only 4.1% of national sea area.
China has been consolidating the top-level legislation and systems for reserve management. A 2018 shake-up gave sole control of protected areas to one newly created body, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. This was an improvement on responsibility being scattered between several bodies.
This year’s new Ecological and Environmental Code, meanwhile, has merged various laws on pollution, oversight, conservation and compensation mechanisms into a single legal framework.
That has created a clearer system under which MPAs can operate. But judging progress towards marine conservation goals isn’t just about the top-level system and how many MPAs have been designated. We also need to ask whether conservation and management is actually working on the ground.
Lack of frontline management
In 2008, Richard B Harris, a conservationist with 20 years of experience in China, said the country’s biodiversity conservation goals had outstripped its ability to implement them.
That remains true today. Marine reserves were struggling to put structures and staff in place, noted a 2018 report from the standing committee of the National People’s Congress. There was no guaranteed funding, and oversight was weak. A 2025 Chinese Academy of Sciences study also found that a third of sampled reserves lacked an independent management body, or full-time staff.
The greatest pressures are on the frontline. The Beilun estuary national park, founded in 1983, borders 13 villages and the day to day management team is tiny. “We have only eight permanent staff members,” said a worker there. “And there’s been no expansion of that for almost 10 years.”
As a result, he says, “I spend almost every day in the office dealing with paperwork.” There’s so much of it because conservation work in the reserve is driven by project funding. Once a project is completed, the outcomes have to be compiled into a report and sent up the line. The administrative burden makes it hard to actually manage the reserve day to day.
Even the Minjiang estuary wetland park, raised to national status in 2013 and so better-resourced, is struggling with frontline enforcement.
Clams have been farmed here for centuries, with villagers making a living in the tidal zone and nearshore waters. But from 2013, the local government banned activities like gathering seafood, digging for clams and fishing.
Illicit clam farming continues today, often during the brief ebb tides. The footprints and signs of digging are soon washed away by the returning sea.
Reserve managers in Minjiang said that despite clear laws and regulation, they need to visit a site of suspected illegal activity several times to gather evidence.
Many cases are too expensive to pursue and so go nowhere. When they come face to face with people breaking the rules, the rangers mostly try to persuade them to desist. To avoid conflict, they remind them of the law, rather than issuing fines. The rangers are often neighbours or relatives of those they are trying to police, which only makes things more difficult.
Who pays the price for marine conservation?
The villagers told me they understand the value of improving the environment. After all, they know the estuary well and understand how it and its wildlife are changing. Many are happy to get involved with regular work such as collecting marine litter.
One villager said: “Who would go digging up clams if they had a better alternative?”
But most of the conflict between villagers and the Beilun reserve arises from restrictions on options for better livelihoods. Villagers affirm the value of the mangrove swamps and nearby villagers have a tradition of caring for mangroves. Yet they find it harder to build tourism businesses or open small shops when reserve managers restrict commercial activity outside the reserve’s borders. The managers’ intentions are good – to protect the surrounding waters, sediment and roots of the mangrove swamp – but the human cost is real. A cadre in a village near Beilun said conservation demands cut off a lot of routes to development.
In both Beilun and Minjiang, ranger and sanitation jobs were given to villagers to provide transitional employment, as at many coastal reserves. However, those jobs offer only short-term relief and do not provide pensions or make up for the loss of foraging and business opportunities.
When arrangements for compensation, ongoing use of protected areas and alternative livelihoods remain uncertain, the villagers see only bans, then worry about loss of income and fairness. They feel the burdens of conservation are falling on their shoulders, with no associated economic benefits. Those resentments are taken out on frontline staff, who struggle to enforce the rules among a resistant population. This reduces the long-term effectiveness of the reserve.
This isn’t just a Chinese problem. United Kingdom researchers studying illegal fishing on Rodrigues, an island territory of Mauritius, found fishers believe the practice to be widespread because of a lack of alternatives, not just patchy enforcement.
The researchers recommended that if an MPA will affect local fishers, alternative livelihoods should be offered before it is established.
For China, the key challenge to the 30×30 target is improving local management capabilities. At a deeper level, if marine conservation is to be both effective and fair, the state will need to provide institutional support for managing grassroots protected areas. Communities will need to gain the security and benefits they expect from conservation.
A retired cadre who worked at the Beilun reserve said: “The ‘mass line’ has always been our fine tradition. Those who have lived by the sea for generations could be its most reliable protectors.”
