Experts Discuss Cross-Border Biodiversity Conservation

At the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Tropical Biology and Conservation, held in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, several Chinese and foreign experts discussed crossborder biodiversity conservation. Participating experts said that many species range across national borders, and conservation work also needs support from crossnational collaboration and joint mechanisms. Xing Yaowu, director of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that some countries in the stage of rapid development still need greater awareness of biodiversity conservation. The Chinese side is carrying out baseline surveys in cooperation with relevant countries to help identify species and ecological resources, and then jointly formulate conservation plans. Scholars from Indonesia and Brunei, drawing on cooperative practices, said that crossborder conservation still faces issues in implementation such as inconsistent standards, complicated procedures, and differences in regulations. They suggested that by unifying rules, simplifying processes, clarifying divisions of labor, and making arrangements for intellectual property rights, crossborder scientific research and conservation cooperation can be made more systematic.