Ruoergai (Zoige) Alpine Peatland Restoration (China)

The Ruoergai (Zoige) Plateau, straddling Sichuan and Gansu provinces at around 3,500 m altitude near the source of the Yellow River, holds roughly 350,000 ha of peatland - the largest high-altitude peatland complex in China, storing an estimated 69% of the carbon held in the country's peatlands. From the 1960s to the 1990s, around 920 km of drainage ditches were dug to convert peatland to pasture, degrading more than 65,000 ha and threatening habitat for the endangered Black-necked Crane as well as the upper Yellow River's water-regulation function.

The Ruoergai National Wetlands Nature Reserve Administration and Hongyuan Forestry Bureau, with funding from UNEP-GEF and the EU-China Biodiversity Conservation Programme, blocked drainage canals using wood, concrete, peat and sand dams and re-seeded bare peat surfaces. Field monitoring recorded water levels rising by up to 26 cm in deep canals and up to 50 cm in shallow ones - enough to cause overflow and rewetting of adjacent peat surfaces.

Documented restoration to date covers approximately 1,568 ha - roughly 2% of the 65,000 ha degraded by historic drainage - making this a proof-of-concept rather than a landscape-scale reversal. A peer-reviewed assessment (Ecological Engineering, 2011) describes the approach as technically effective but still small in scale relative to the extent of degradation.

Subsequent academic work (Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2022) continues to document reduced carbon sequestration in degraded areas, underscoring the case for further scale-up, and later multi-scale water-conservation strategies (2024) have built on the original canal-damming approach.

Read the full analysis: https://peatlands.org/document/restoration-of-high-altitude-peatlands-in-ruoergai-plateau-china/