Some 12 years ago, the Critically Endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper, a highly charismatic Asian migratory coastal waterbird, became a priority for RSPB global species recovery work. Help was needed on the East Asian Australasian Flyway (EAAF), and with our expertise in conservation of coastal waterbirds and their habitats, we wanted to play our part. Today, World Wetlands Day, RSPB Principal Policy Officer and policy lead for the BirdLife International Global Flyways Programme, Nicola Crockford, reflects on some of the extraordinary advances in coastal wetland conservation that have resulted.
On a mission to stop waterbird extinctionHaving organised the large-scale search across the Mediterranean and eastwards, around 2010, which failed to prove the continued existence of the Slender-billed Curlew, I felt compelled to try and stop the Spoon-billed Sandpiper from also disappearing down the extinction plughole – only about 800 individuals are left.
Spoon-billed Sandpipers are the only shorebird that hatch with a specialised bill. They breed in north-east Russia and stage, along with millions of other waterbirds, in the Yellow Sea of China, North Korea and South Korea, during their migrations to and from south-east Asia. Image credits: Pavel Tomkovich. Map credit: Chang et al. Post-breeding migration of adult Spoon-billed Sandpipers. Wader Study 127: 200-209, showing locations of 13 satellite-tagged Spoon-billed sandpipers on post-breeding migration.
Multidisciplinary teamwork for flyway conservationWorking with a large team, within and beyond RSPB and BirdLife International (of which the RSPB is UK Partner), committed to saving the Spoon-billed Sandpiper or “spoonies” as they are affectionately known, I led the policy work to stop the unprecedented rate of destruction being suffered by Yellow Sea coastal wetlands.
Coastal wetland conservation became one of the BirdLife Global Flyways Programme’s four priorities, coastal waterbirds being among the three most threatened groups of migratory birds. Credit: Bruce Liggitt.
Saving the spoonie’s key stopover siteLess than a decade ago, we discovered that Tiaozini in China supported half the world’s Spoon-billed Sandpiper population every autumn, just as permission was given for its destruction by the world’s biggest coastal land claim project. The previous largest such project, in 2006, destroyed Saemangeum, South Korea – the most important Yellow Sea waterbird site – resulting in several species declining catastrophically, which triggered an international call to action.
Everyone said it was impossible to save the Yellow Sea wetlands in general and Tiaozini in particular – the spoonie’s extinction, and increased threat status of many other waterbirds, seemed inevitable. But they reckoned without the persistence of RSPB, BirdLife, the East Asian Australasian Flyway Partnership (EAAFP) and the commitment of China, from top politicians, to local government, to individuals on the ground, to conserve coastal wetlands.
Tiaozini is now a World Heritage Site and China’s coastal wetland conservation policies are perhaps the strongest in the world. But how did we help this achieve this miracle?
Inspirational actionFirstly, we requested IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) to commission an independent report on the status of intertidal habitats of the EAAF and especially the Yellow Sea ahead of their quadrennial World Congress in 2012 at Jeju on the South Korean Yellow Sea coast, at which, consequently, the world’s governments adopted a resolution committing to conserve these wetlands. This started a chain reaction…
In 2014 we co-organised an international workshop in Beijing to plan how China could implement this resolution. South and North Korea followed with similar workshops. In August 2016, just ahead of the next IUCN World Congress, I helped IUCN facilitate a bilateral meeting in Beijing between China and South Korea, who agreed to develop a transboundary cooperation mechanism for Yellow Sea conservation. The Congress then adopted a Resolution calling on Yellow Sea countries to consider World Heritage nomination of these wetlands, and for the development of a global coastal wetland initiative in the framework of the Conventions on Biodiversity (CBD) and Wetlands (Ramsar).
World Heritage provides solutionsRemarkably, in January 2017 China added 14 Yellow Sea sites to their World Heritage tentative list. That autumn, Yancheng in Jiangsu province, hosted their first international symposium on coastal wetland conservation in support of nominating their two coastal wetlands. At this we convened the first IUCN workshop of all three Yellow Sea nations, at which they made the historic decision to establish a Yellow Sea coastal wetland conservation working group.
The Yancheng World Heritage nomination was submitted in January 2018 in record time. That summer China issued probably the strongest coastal wetland protection regulation in the world. But, there was a problem; the nomination excluded Tiaozini, just to the south of Yancheng. At the Yancheng symposium that autumn, China’s Professor Lei Guangchun presented our new research evidence, including from satellite tracking, showing how vital Tiaozini is for the birds.
China listened and added Tiaozini to the nomination. To cut a long story short, in July 2019 Yancheng, including Tiaozini was inscribed on the World Heritage List. Next January I was humbled to be presented the Jiangsu Friendship Award for my support for this inscription. But the real reward is watching Spoon-billed Sandpipers safely feed out on Tiaozini’s tidal flats, and roost at sites the RSPB helped design in adjacent fields and ponds, while the billboards that advertised the reclamation plans were replaced by signs promoting the World Heritage Site. The latest inspirational action from China concerns the massive problem of the invasive alien Spartina cord grass that by encroaching on the intertidal area was rendering them unsuitable for waterbirds. Plans have been announced to eradicate 90% of Spartina from China’s coast by 2025!
A Spoon-billed Sandpiper at Tiaozini, Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province, on China’s Yellow Sea coast. Credit: Dongming Li.
Inspiring others to take action for coastal wetlandsThis success story is also inspiring other coastal wetland conservation initiatives, not only in China, the Yellow Sea and the EAAF, but globally, that will surely contribute to meeting the new Global Biodiversity targets.
• Already in 2018 North Korea joined the Ramsar Convention, designating Mundok as its first coastal wetland Ramsar Site. • In 2021, South Korea’s most important Yellow Sea coastal wetlands were added to the World Heritage List and they are working on a Phase II nomination for the remaining sites. • China submitted its Phase II World Heritage nomination in early 2022. Of course, not everything is perfect. For example, a couple of key sites in Jiangsu are missing from China’s nomination. We hope that will change before it goes to the World Heritage Committee in 2024.
These Yellow Sea achievements have in turn inspired us in the UK, to propose England’s East Coast, from the Humber to the Thames as a World Heritage Site. We hope that in the next months it will be added to the UK’s Tentative List.
Furthermore, during the 2019 Yancheng conference to celebrate its new World Heritage status, Patricia Zurita, BirdLife’s CEO and an Asian Development Bank (ADB) Leader began to hatch a plan which was recently launched as the transformative ADB, BirdLife, EAAFP Regional Flyway Initiative. It is mobilising 3 billion US dollars, to conserve more than 50, mainly coastal, wetland sites in 10 Asian countries, for nature and people. It recognizes the immense ecosystem services that coastal wetlands provide, from carbon storage, to disaster risk reduction from flooding, to marine products such as fish, to ecotourism and wellbeing. A similar initiative has just been launched for the Americas. This approach looks like being a game changer.
A new forum to accelerate coastal ecosystem conservationFinally, that 2019 Yancheng conference declaration suggested Yancheng play a leading role in the establishment of the World Coastal Forum that had been called for, since the 2017 conference, by Resolutions of the Convention on Migratory Species, Ramsar and CBD. Last November at the Ramsar Conference co-hosted by China, President Xi Jinping himself announced that China would host a World Coastal Forum conference, and Yancheng offered to host it in 2023.
This followed more than a year of intensive work to establish the forum, enabled by China’s Ministry of Natural Resources and co-coordinated by Eco-Foundation Global and me, for RSPB/BirdLife. It looks set to be an innovative multi-stakeholder platform to support governments, business and others to actually implement their international commitments on coastal ecosystem protection, sustainable management and protection. It will be an umbrella to help overcome the fragmentation that so hampers our attempts to conserve nature and especially our coasts, where governance and management is probably the most fragmented of all ecosystems.
It aims to ensure everyone’s efforts are more than the sum of their parts, avoiding duplication of effort and helping scale up successes in coastal conservation, from local to global, channelling state of the art evidence and support tools back from global to local to build capacity and effectiveness.
Hopefully this new concerted, collaborative and coordinated approach will help ensure that in 2030 we don’t again look back at a lost decade of failed global biodiversity targets. Instead, coastal migratory waterbirds, which are the sentinels of the health of our coastal wetlands and of our success at cooperating internationally to conserve them, will be thriving, safely completing their phenomenal annual journeys for evermore.
Looking back, on this World Wetlands Day, on the unexpectedly great progress that has been made in conserving Yellow Sea coastal wetlands, and so in ensuring the future of the millions of waterbirds that depend on them, enabling future generations also to enjoy this wondrous part of our natural heritage, the huge amount of work involved feels well worth it. Even more so, since seeing the knock-on benefits for coastal ecosystems around the world. It has been an immense privilege to work with outstanding teams of people along the way. It is perhaps not surprising that there seems to be something about people who care about migratory waterbirds that means they flock together in common cause to achieve exceptional results.
Continue reading• The mighty Pacific: how the RSPB is working with partners in Japan and Taiwan to reduce albatross deaths in High Seas fisheries• Crossing borders and continents for conservation – the story of the Egyptian Vulture• BirdLife’s birthday – everyone welcome!
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