At the China Pavilion during COP17 — the UN biodiversity summit held this year in Yerevan, Armenia — China's Jiangsu province used its 'Jiangsu Day' event on October 26 to make a case that dense, wealthy regions can still be good homes for wildlife. It's a relevant idea for travellers who assume developed river deltas have little nature left to see.

The numbers behind the pitch are striking. Jiangsu covers just 1.1 percent of China's land but holds about 6 percent of its population and over 10 percent of its GDP. Yet province-wide surveys completed in 2025 logged 9,266 species, including 2,363 recorded there for the first time. Air quality improved too, with PM2.5 levels down 16.5 percent over the last five-year plan period.

Much of the presentation focused on the Yangtze River, where Jiangsu has pioneered environmental DNA monitoring — analysing genetic material in water samples instead of capturing animals. Nineteen routine monitoring sections across eight cities now run four surveys a year. Between 2021 and 2025, recorded fish species jumped from 84 to 104, with protected species like the Chinese sucker and long-snout catfish reappearing. Better still for wildlife fans: finless porpoise DNA was detected at every single monitoring site, and the species has become a mascot for Nanjing's riverfront.

That porpoise has an unusually engaged public behind it. Volunteers in Nanjing have filed more than 69,000 sighting records, while the 'Fish for Finless Porpoises' campaign has released over six million juvenile fish across 100-plus events with 5,000 participants. Over 300 international volunteers from 15-plus countries have joined in. There's even a 'Help Crabs Return Home' project that runs night patrols and builds recycled-material passageways for migrating Chinese mitten crabs.

Legal and restoration work backs this up. China's first provincial biodiversity law for plain river-network regions took effect in Jiangsu in May 2025. The province has created 23 'ecological island' pilot zones and restored 3,735 hectares of wetlands. Crested ibises were released along China's east coast for the first time in 2023 and bred naturally in the wild by May 2026, while more than 500,000 waterbirds now winter in the province each year. Changshu, Yancheng and Suzhou have all earned International Wetland City status, and Nanjing joined the Nature Cities platform at COP16.

For travellers, the takeaway is that the Yangtze corridor around Nanjing — and Jiangsu's wetland cities — are quietly becoming genuine ecotourism territory, from porpoise-watching on the river to wintering waterbird spectacles at Yancheng's coastal wetlands. The COP17 event also doubled as a bridge between Jiangsu and Armenia, comparing migratory bird routes, Lake Sevan and Jiangsu's river basins, with talks on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Story via Laotian Times.