Reuters, Shanghai

China will make the protection of nature a priority and crack down on damage to habitats, the government said in a policy paper days before it hosts talks aimed at drawing up a new global biodiversity treaty.

China has acknowledged that decades of industrial development and rapid urbanisation have devastated ecosystems, put dozens of species on the brink of extinction and raised the risk of spreading diseases like Covid-19.

A new biodiversity “white paper” published on Friday acknowledged China “has a long way to go” but said it had identified 2.763 million square kilometres of “priority conservation” areas - 28.8 percent of its total territory.

A UN biodiversity conference known as COP15 gets underway in Kunming, southwest China, tomorrow, with discussions taking place online as a result of Covid-19 restrictions. The second round will be in April.

Environmental groups hope the conference can introduce more ambitious biodiversity targets, even though goals set in Aichi, Japan, in 2010 were not achieved.

A major issue is persuading nations to commit to the protection of 30% of their territory by 2030.