About China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation

China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation

The China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, abbreviated CBCGDF and known in Chinese as Zhongguo Lü Fahiu or Lü Fahiu for short, is a national environmental foundation and non-governmental organisation headquartered in the Haidian District of Beijing. Established in 1985 as the China Milu Foundation — created to receive and support the Père David's deer, or milu, reintroduced to China that year after the species' extinction in its homeland — it has grown into one of China's oldest environmental organisations and, by its own account, the country's most prolific filer of environmental public interest lawsuits. It is supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology, registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and a partner of the Convention on Migratory Species.

The foundation's three founders were vice-chairmen of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference: Lu Zhengcao, Qian Changzhao and Burhan Shahidi. Its chairman in recent listings is Hu Deping and its secretary-general Zhou Jinfeng, a member of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. Its scientists advised the Chinese government during the negotiations for China's accession to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, and since the revised Environmental Protection Law of 2015 gave qualified social organisations standing to sue, the foundation states that it has filed more than half of China's environmental public interest litigation cases.

Founding in 1985 and the return of the milu

The foundation began with a single species. The milu, Père David's deer (Elaphurus davidianus), is native to the marshes and plains of the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys, recognisable by its combination of a horse-like face, a donkey's tail, cow-like hooves and a stag's antlers. Hunting and habitat loss reduced it until, by the early 1900s, it was extinct in China; the world population survived only because a French missionary, Père Armand David, had sent specimens to Europe in 1866, and because the Duke of Bedford gathered eighteen of them at Woburn Abbey in 1898 into the herd from which all living milu descend.

In 1985 the reintroduction began: 38 milu returned to Nanhaizi Milu Park in Beijing between 1985 and 1987, and a further 39 arrived at the Dafeng Milu Nature Reserve in Jiangsu in 1986 — 77 deer that laid the foundation for the species' restoration. To receive the Duke of Bedford's gift and support the breeding and popularisation of the deer, Lu Zhengcao, Qian Changzhao and Burhan Shahidi founded the China Milu Foundation in 1985. The reintroduction it was created to support became one of conservation's emblematic successes: from the two sites of 1985–86 the milu spread, as Beijing and Dafeng sent animals onward, to 81 locations by 2020, with the population growing to more than 8,000 and wild herds forming independent of human protection; Dafeng alone grew from 39 deer in 1986 to 5,016 by the end of 2019.

From milu foundation to national biodiversity body

The foundation outgrew its single-species origin. Renamed the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, it took biodiversity conservation and green development as its general mandate while remaining, in its own description, a nationwide non-profit public foundation and independent environmental NGO. In 1992 its scientists served as scientific advisers to the Chinese government in the negotiations for China's accession to the Convention on Biological Diversity, contributing expertise that helped shape China's approach to biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

Its institutional standing is international as well as national. The foundation is a member of IUCN and of the United Nations Global Compact, an accredited observer to the intergovernmental science body IPBES, an observer to CITES and to the FAO's International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, a member of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network, and a data publisher through GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, since 2018. In 2016 it signed a partnership agreement with the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species, becoming the first Chinese organisation to partner with the CMS, and in the process established an Ecological Belt and Road Initiative. Its partnership list also includes the United Nations Environment Programme, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Wildlife Fund.

Species conservation programmes

Species protection remains the foundation's first field of work. The endangered species on which it focuses include the pangolin, the great bustard, the Yangtze river dolphin or baiji, bluefin tuna and the maple Acer pentaphyllum, among others. Its campaign against the pangolin trade — including a fierce and publicly reported contest with the Guangxi Forestry Department — was credited with opening a reform of China's wildlife rescue system, and its public challenge to pangolin banquets and to the use of pangolin scales drew national attention through reporting in the Washington Post and Caixin.

Other campaigns show the same pattern of public advocacy. The foundation worked with governments and partners to conserve the great bustard, the world's heaviest flying bird, work recognised in National Geographic reporting in 2017; it kept alive scientific and public hope for the baiji dolphin, reported by Xinhua in 2018; and it campaigned against the serving of bluefin tuna in China, calling out what it characterised as greenwashing in the fish trade. Alongside species work it advises industry and government bodies on sustainable development and the environmental impacts of projects, and its scientific staff are engaged in research and management planning in reserve wildlife habitats across the country.

Community Conservation Areas

In April 2016 the foundation launched its Community Conservation Area system, known as CCAfa, through which it lobbies conservation work down to community level. Community conservation areas are sites where local people — often volunteers organised with the foundation's support — protect a species or habitat on their own initiative: a nesting beach, a migratory stopover, a grove, a stretch of wetland. By its early reporting the system had established over 100 such areas in China, and the GBIF profile describes the foundation as having funded hundreds of grassroots NGOs and supported thousands of individuals.

The grassroots model extends to migratory-bird protection, where the foundation works with schools and a large network of wildlife volunteers through local initiatives to keep flyways safe, and to public education: it organises environmental and conservation events around the country intended, in its formula, to make people aware, encourage them and empower them. The foundation labels itself grassroots-based, though the working system has sometimes brought trouble to the Beijing-based organisation, as when the detention of one of its environmental workers in 2018 drew public outcry and was later withdrawn — episodes reported by Sixth Tone and Radio Free Asia that illustrate both the reach and the friction of community-level conservation work in China.

Environmental public interest litigation

The foundation's most distinctive modern role is legal. The revised Environmental Protection Law that took effect in 2015 gave qualified non-governmental organisations the right to bring environmental public interest litigation — to sue polluters on behalf of the public. The CBCGDF became the country's most active user of that right: by its account it has filed more than 50 percent of China's environmental public interest litigation cases to date, and an EU–China NGO twinning report counted 46 such suits by 2016 alone.

Landmark cases: Tengger, Bohai Bay and beyond

Its landmark cases define the field. In the Tengger Desert pollution litigation, arising from the dumping of untreated waste in the desert of Inner Mongolia, the Supreme People's Court's 2016 ruling established the test for NGO standing in environmental cases, a precedent analysed by the Environmental Law Institute as a key victory for citizen suits in China. In the Bohai Bay case the foundation sued the oil companies ConocoPhillips and CNOOC over the 2011 Penglai oil spill, in litigation reported as a landmark marine pollution lawsuit. Other cases protected old red willows threatened by a hydropower project — resolved when Qinghai agreed to relocate the project works — ancient date trees, for which governments were fined after 500-year-old trees were killed, and schoolchildren exposed to toxic running tracks, a campaign that preceded a national vow to replace poisonous tracks. Not every case succeeded: the foundation was among the NGOs that lost the Changzhou school pollution lawsuit of 2017, in which courts declined to find the defendant chemical plants liable for contamination near a prestigious school.

Culture, education and green development

Beyond litigation and species work, the foundation promotes eco-tourism and faith-based conservation, aiming to expand public awareness of China's natural resources while creating economic incentives for their preservation. Its education initiatives raise awareness of environmental issues and encourage sustainable practices, and its public events range from migratory bird day activities published with international partners to exhibitions such as the 2017 Beijing showing of nineteenth-century bird art.

The "green development" half of its name reflects this broader brief: the foundation presents conservation not as the opposite of development but as a discipline within it, advising on projects in several Chinese cities and participating in the policy conversation through the CPPCC connections of its leadership. Its secretary-general Zhou Jinfeng is a member of the Club of Rome as well as of the IUCN's World Commission on Environmental Law, placing the foundation's leadership inside international environmental-law and sustainability networks.

Assessment and place among Chinese environmental organisations

Founded a decade before most Chinese environmental NGOs existed, the CBCGDF occupies a distinctive position: older and more state-connected than the grassroots groups that followed it — it was founded by CPPCC vice-chairmen and is supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology — yet responsible, through its litigation, for some of the most consequential confrontations between Chinese civil society and polluting enterprises, including state oil companies and local governments. Academic and policy analyses accordingly treat it as a state-backed environmental organisation that nonetheless uses the courts aggressively in the public interest.

For a directory of Chinese organisations, the foundation is an essential entry: custodian of the milu's return in 1985, adviser to China's biodiversity accession in 1992, first Chinese partner of the Convention on Migratory Species in 2016, operator of more than a hundred community conservation areas, and filer — by its own account — of over half of China's environmental public interest lawsuits. Its trajectory from a single-species deer foundation to a national biodiversity and litigation body traces the development of organised environmental protection in China itself.