Green drive scales new peaks - Seite 2

Most of the 10 pilot parks have a core protected area and a general protected area. Regulation is stricter in the core protected areas, with commercial activities, such as tourism, banned and other forms of human activity kept to a minimum. That even applies to local residents, who are being relocated from the parks' core protected areas.

The core protected area of Qilian Mountain National Park－27,500 sq km－accounts for 55 percent of its total area.

The mountains' ecosystem faced severe threats from overgrazing, tourism, mining and commercial logging dating back to the 1980s. By the 1990s, their natural resources were overexploited by more than 500 mining enterprises and 150 hydropower stations, according to Gansu's provincial government.

Thanks to the launch of the pilot national parks, the ecosystem of the Qilian Mountains has been recovering steadily, although threats to the mountains' environment have not been completely eradicated.

Economic Information Daily, a newspaper affiliated with Xinhua News Agency, reported that large-scale illegal coal mining had continued to devastate the environment of the Qilian Mountains and reported that a company was suspected of making billions of yuan through illegal coal mining in the past 14 years.

The government of Haixi prefecture, where the mine is located, sent a special team to investigate the case and the Qinghai provincial government sent a special inspection team a day after it was reported.

Two senior officials in Haixi prefecture were removed from their posts for dereliction of supervision duty on illicit mining in Muli coal field in the Qilian Mountains, the provincial government announced at a news conference in 2020.

Liang Yanguo, a member of the Party committee of the prefecture, and Li Yongping, head of the Muli coal field management bureau, were removed from their posts and are under further investigation, according to the provincial discipline inspection commission.

Another three officials from local supervision departments in Haixi were also removed from office and put under investigation.

Since 2017, the central government has conducted two rounds of environmental inspections, including one in the Qilian Mountains.

Illegal mining and commercial logging in the mountains have been banned, and tours that could damage the environment have been suspended. Herdsmen have also been relocated from the core protected area of Qilian Mountain National Park.