Authorities in China have agreed to work with an independent U.S. institute to learn how to successfully manage the country’s national parks. This is part of the government's efforts to improve and preserve the environment, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The agreement was made following the signing of a cooperation pact between the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the U.S. Paulson Institute on June 8, Monday, which will be conducted for China's national park system over the next three years.
Based on reform guidelines issued by the State Council in May, the pilot program will be tried in the national park systems in nine chosen regions and will run until the end of 2017. The regions include Beijing, Heilongjiang, Hubei, Hunan, Jilin, Fujian, Qinghai, Yunnan and Zhejiang.
The NDRC said that the program will look into how the national conservation areas are managed, how geological parks and the wood parks can be improved, and identify successful measures that can be applied across the country.
According to the NDRC, the program will only explore and develop a system to manage the parks, but will not be used to establish new parks.
Under the signed agreement, it is the NDRC that will provide the main policy direction for the program, while the institute will provide technological and research support.
The country has only a handful of national parks in Heilongjiang and Zhejiang provinces, but it has thousands of conservation areas, covering about 18 percent of the country.
Founded in 2011 by former U.S. treasury secretary Henry Paulson, the institute aims to promote economic growth and environmental preservation in China and the United States. In Sept. 2014, it launched a project on climate change and air quality, focused on China's air pollution.