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Featured Publications
Is Russia Losing in Ukraine but Winning in the Global South?
Kathryn Stoner examines why the Global South has such a different perspective from the Global North on Russia’s war in Ukraine, and what that might mean for the international order.
A new book by Oriana Skylar Mastro offers a novel framework to explain China's 30-year journey to great power status through strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship.
Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI
Florence G'Sell lays out all the options that are “on the table” for regulating artificial intelligence and increasing communication, cooperation, and transparency among the technology's many stakeholders.
The Transatlantic High Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online and Freedom of Expression is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania in partnership with The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam. This is a discussion paper from that working group.
Global Ecology and Conservation,
September 26, 2019
Over 240 migratory water bird species depend on China's 18,000 km coastline as a vital stopover area. However, the rapid loss of natural wetlands has threatened this seasonal water bird migration over the last few decades. In the present study, to improve our understanding of the pattern and amount of habitat loss in key stopover areas (KSAs) and the spatial covariance between habitat loss and economic development, we conducted a spatially explicit evaluation of coastal habitat loss in KSAs and explored its relationship with social and economic dynamics along the China coast by integrating high-spatial resolution satellite imagery with an updated coastal water bird investigation data set. The remote sensing survey detected a habitat loss percentage of 19.4% in the KSAs during 2000 and 2010. Aquaculture, urbanization, and land reclamation were responsible for the most severe disturbances to coastal habitats. These results demonstrate that the losses of wetland habitats in the KSAs in Chinese coastal areas are more severe than those in other coastal areas even though more protective measures have been implemented in these areas. Risk-based analysis showed that the risk of habitat loss was greatest in undeveloped regions with rich natural wetland and large populations, thereby demonstrating the critical importance of shifting the focus of water bird conservation to these regions to ensure the conservation of migratory water birds in the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. These findings disagree with the hypothesis that more habitats are lost when the economy is more developed. Therefore, we suggest that focusing conservation decisions on areas undergoing urbanization might improve the effectiveness of conservation measures given the pressures due to various forms of wetland exploitation.
