Fund aims to protect urban watersheds
Members of Partnership for the Mega-city Watershed Protection officially launched a water fund in Beijing on Aug 28, to better protect the watersheds of big cities.
PMWP is an NGO partnership formed in 2013 that is committed to developing a network and platform for sharing experience and lessons-learned on watershed protection. Its members include International Union for Conservation of Nature, Beijing Forestry Society and the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation.
The fund will enable private entities and companies to contribute to watershed protection by donating money that will be used on watershed-protection programs. That is to say, downstream water users will pay upstream communities and residents for water protection service and activities, thus to enable the sustainable development of whole area, according to Wang Xiaoping, president ot the Beijing Forestry Society.
As the newest member of PMWP, China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation is the only national public fund that focuses on biodiversity conservation. The foundation believes watershed protection is among its most important tasks, and the initiation of Chinese Mega-City Water Fund is just another effort it made to preserve the ecosystem, according to the foundation’s statement.
Since the 1990s, IUCN, Forest Trends, and the Beijing Forestry Society, which are now all members of PMWP, have been working to protect the Miyun Reservoir and its watershed, and have accumulated valuable experience in planting forests to conserve water, improving the livelihood of watershed communities.
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