Many readers will be aware that the UN’s biodiversity conference – the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP17 – is taking place in Yerevan, Armenia this October. It is an important meeting: for the first time, countries are taking stock of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, measuring progress against its 23 targets for 2030 using the national biodiversity strategies they have submitted. It is the first real test of whether the 2022 deal is turning pledges into results, with only four years left.
Despite progress in some areas it is clear that, collectively, the international community is not on track. The Paulson Institute’s report “Financing Nature – A Mid-Decade Update“, published in September 2026, found that the global biodiversity financing gap – the difference between what the world spends on nature and what it needs to spend to safeguard the most important ecosystems and the services they provide) has grown from USD c711 billion in 2019 to 1.3 trillion in 2025 (using data from BloombergNEF). It is a damning indictment of how we manage the global economy that, for every dollar spent on conserving nature, more than 30 are spent incentivising its destruction through harmful subsidies in agriculture, fisheries and forestry. I don’t believe the public supports such warped incentives and, with greater transparency about how public money is used, I believe there would be more pressure on politicians to ensure that it supports public goods.
That trajectory is why success stories matter so much. So it is heartening to report that, at the China Pavilion at COP17, a whole day was dedicated to Beijing’s biodiversity, with the Beijing Swift Project as the centrepiece. Lyndon Kearsley, a swift expert who has been an invaluable part of the project since 2014, was invited to present the results of the tracking study that has followed the swifts from the Summer Palace in Beijing to southern Africa and back. It was a big moment for the project and a celebration of all the hard work by so many people. The project has been led by the China Birdwatching Society, the Beijing Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center and the Beijing Academy of Forestry and Landscape Architecture, with the support of scientists from Europe, including from the British Trust for Ornithology. It was Dick Newell who, back in 2013, first suggested to me the potential for a collaboration between European and Chinese scientists to track the Beijing Swift and it has been one of the honours of my life to be involved in the project from the beginning, including latterly working with H.E Bruno Angelet, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Belgium to China, who has spearheaded the latest phase.
There is no doubt that the Beijing Swift Project is a fantastic example of how countries can work together to better understand the ecology of a species that spans continents, the data from which can be used to support its conservation.
The Beijing Swift is an iconic species that has captured the public imagination. It links China’s capital with southern Africa, via Central Asia, the Gulf and Arabia; latest data show that it flies more than 100,000km in a single year (the 30,000km often quoted is the distance between Beijing and southern Africa and back that does not take into account the birds’ every day movements); and, thanks to the latest technology, in 2026 we were able to confirm that these birds stay airborne for nine months from when they leave Beijing in late July until their return the following April – eating, drinking and even sleeping (though not sure how they do it!) in the air. All of this makes the Beijing Swift the perfect ambassador for Beijing’s and China’s biodiversity.
As readers of Wild Beijing will know, Beijing is an incredibly rich city for nature. Located on one of the world’s major migratory bird routes – the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF) – and cradled by mountains, the capital supports a range of habitats and an incredible amount of wildlife. A staggering 7,121 species were recorded in baseline surveys between 2020-2024. This includes more than 60 species of Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies), over 180 species of butterfly, more than 60 mammals (including the leopard cat), 24 reptiles, 8 amphibians, more than 1,500 native plants and, of course, more than 550 species of bird have been recorded since records began. That is impressive for a major capital city. The graphic below, reproduced with permission, was created by 胡元瀞 (Hú YuánJìng) on behalf of the 生环局 (Beijing Bureau of Ecology and Environment) and 园林局 (Beijing Municipal Forests and Parks Bureau) to showcase this biodiversity and was used to decorate the China pavilion at COP17.
I could not imagine such a profile for Beijing’s nature when I arrived in the city in 2010 – the progress here in terms of awareness, understanding, scientific research, media coverage and political priority for nature has been impressive. Of course there is still a long way to go to fully integrate nature into urban planning (including rebalancing the over-emphasis on tree cover) but, working on these issues, there is nowhere I would rather be.
For more detail about the Beijing Swift Project, see here. And for more details about “Beijing Day” at COP17, click here for an article (in Chinese).
In the meantime, enjoy the graphic!
