Establishing Conservation Easement System to Promote Unified Management of China's National Parks: US-Based Experience

Establishing a hierarchical and unified management system is one of the core objectives of China's national park system. Facing a pressure of man-land contradiction in the context of large population, intensively distributed communities, complex land ownership, and a high proportion of collective land, China needs to explore a flexible and refined way to realize unified management in national parks. Conservation easement, originated from the U.S., is a new tool featured by fully respecting reasonable human-land relationship and servants' legal rights, emphasizing ecological compensation with refined conservation needs, and without changing land proprietary rights. It can be used to integrate land resources fragmented by decentralized property rights but are actually continuous ecological elements and geographic landscape, and finally supports to realize an efficient and unified management.From experiences of the United States, conservation easement has two advantages.First, without changing land proprietary rights, a conservation easement is an effective tool to develop optimal conservation strategies for protection targets which rely on the human-nature compound system. Second, when the budget is limited or land owner is not willing to sell the land, by restricting part of the bundle rights, a conservation easement can be used to find a compromise and achieve a balance between conservation and development. In this study, we hold that although China's land property right system is different from the private ownership of western countries, conservation easement can be integrated with Chinese legal system by reasonably adjusting its legal principles and improving supporting systems. It is suggested to establish a conservation easement system for China's national parks with Chinese characteristics by adjusting and improving relevant laws, constructing supporting institutional mechanisms, clearly defining behavior boundaries for resource utilization, developing implementation effectiveness evaluation criteria, and establishing positive and negative feedback mechanisms. With all these measures, conservation easement will contribute to a unified management of Chinese national parks.