County to boost protection efforts

Yuanyang county in Yunnan province will strengthen the protection of its terraced rice fields, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Li Yi, director of the Yuanyang Management Committee of World Heritage Hani Terraces, said the county will continue to renovate its ancient buildings, which are mostly the homes of people from the Hani ethnic group, mobilize local people to improve sanitary conditions and repair and upgrade the infrastructure.

He said local authorities will also establish a monitoring system and databases to strengthen daily dynamic monitoring of the surrounding forests, villages, terraces and water, as well as agricultural production and natural disasters.

They will establish an expert committee and a think tank for the protection of the terraced fields and regularly invite scholars and experts at the national, provincial and prefecture levels to conduct field research and offer advice related to protection.

Yuanyang aims to develop the site into an ecological demonstration area. It will reinforce the conservation of forests, restore original buildings and strengthen the integrity of local architecture, and it will award subsidies to farmers who turn dry land into paddy fields.

Renovation of the water system will be another major task. The authorities will repair canals, promote a water-saving irrigation system, build a modern drainage network and accelerate construction of reservoirs to improve water utilization.

Li said the management committee has strengthened supervision of key forest areas to prevent any form of logging. By the start of this year, 1.7 hectares of forest in the heritage area had been restored, and soil erosion had been treated across 74.67 square kilometers. The forestation level at the site is now more than 70 percent.

As the water system plays a critical role in making the terraces possible, the management committee has assigned special teams, dubbed "ditch runners", to supervise and maintain the ditches that flow through villages and into the fields. The teams have also focused on two key terraced areas and maintained 140 ditches that span 451.33 kilometers.

Li noted that some villagers still lack a proactive approach to heritage protection. Although local villages have shaken off extreme poverty and have started to develop tourism, the results cannot be consolidated by simply relying on planting on the terraces.

To solve the problem while protecting the environment, Yuanyang will continue to improve local services, integrate agriculture with the tourism and cultural industries, and make efforts to build high-quality agricultural brands, he said.