Yellow Sea Migratory Bird Sanctuaries

The Migratory Bird Sanctuaries along the Coast of the Yellow Sea and the Gulf of Bohai form a natural property inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2019, in its first phase, corresponding to Jiangsu province, around Yancheng. They protect one of the largest systems of intertidal mudflats in the world, an environment formed by the enormous input of sediment from the rivers that empty into the Yellow Sea.

Their importance is global and hard to substitute. These flats are the central staging area of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, along which millions of waders travel each year between their breeding grounds in Siberia and Alaska and their wintering quarters in South-East Asia and Australia. The intertidal muds concentrate an extraordinary invertebrate biomass and work as a refuelling station: without them, the birds cannot complete the journey. Among the species that depend on this stretch of coast are some of the most threatened on the planet, such as the spoon-billed sandpiper, of which only a few hundred pairs remain, and Nordmann's greenshank. The area also holds the principal wintering population of red-crowned crane and is a key site for Père David's deer, reintroduced in the region.

The property was inscribed against a backdrop of urgency: much of the Yellow Sea's tidal flats has been transformed by coastal reclamation, aquaculture and industrial development over recent decades, with losses exceeding half the historical area. The listing brought a Chinese commitment to halt reclamation within the protected areas and served as the basis for extending protection: in 2024 a second phase was inscribed with further components in other coastal provinces.