Tibetan antelopes [Photo/Xinhua]

In recent years, China has gone all out to protect the ecological environment in Tibet Autonomous Region and made remarkable achievements. Today, the kingdom of wildlife on the plateau is growing and showing its vitality.

As an important ecological security barrier of China, Tibet is one of the areas in the world with the best environment quality and the richest biodiversity. It is home to 125 species of wild animals under key state protection, accounting for over 30 percent of China’s total. Tibetan antelope, wild yak, kiang, Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, black-necked crane and other kinds of wildlife live and mulitiply there.   

Currently, the nature reserves in Tibet account for 33.9 percent of the region’s total land area, a proportion leading the country. There are 22 ecological function protected areas of various kinds, eight national forest parks and three national wetland parks.   

Every summer, Tibetan antelopes cross the mountains to complete a long-distance migration. They were once considered "endangered animals" in the 1980s, but the number of this "spirit on the plateau" has risen from about 40,000 to nearly 200,000 now. The quantity of other wild animals has also seen a recovered growth. Tibetan red deer, once considered having been extinct early, were discovered again in the 1990s. Now, its population keeps growing. The number of Tibetan wild donkeys has increased from 30,000 to over 80,000, that of Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys to about 1,000, and that of black-necked cranes to 7,000 or so.     

All this owes to a series of protective measures: building nature reserves, set up special protection agencies and arranging law enforcement personnel, strictly curbing poaching and conducting real-time monitoring over the population activities.

The forestry departments have established protection networks for the habitats of wild animals in various kinds of nature reserves: hunting is completely forbidden in the nature reserves, protected by over one thousand relevant personnel round the clock. Meanwhile, the government is also exploring the implementation of the wildlife accident compensation mechanism to compensate the afflicted farmers and herders.

"How hard it would be to reverse a steady decline in the number of endangered species? The industrious Tibetans achieve it," former US President Jimmy Carter said in the preface he wrote for the book titled Across the Tibetan Plateau: Ecosystems, Wildlife, and Conservation.