How can China curb biological invasions to meet Kunming-Montreal Target 6?

To meet Kunming-Montreal Target 6 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), we need more comprehensive measures to manage invasive alien species (IAS), which is especially true for China, as it is undergoing an unprecedented invasion wave due to its rapid development. This article considers the status of IAS in China, evaluates China’s ongoing actions against IAS, and provides recommendations for improving management. 802 IAS have been identified in China. Facing the growing threats of IAS, China has made progress in IAS management, but stricter and thorough measures are still needed. In addition to improving legislation and governance, China needs to strengthen transdisciplinary and proactive research, implement more comprehensive prevention and control actions against IAS, and enhance international cooperation and translational education. By creating a model for IAS management that other countries can follow, China’s efforts can contribute substantially to the Kunming-Montreal 2030 Global Targets of the CBD.

Methods
By integrating scattered publications and databases, we compiled a novel and comprehensive IAS dataset for China, covering taxon, origin, introduction time and pathway, distribution, and major impacts (Ju et al. 2024). Then, following the framework of categorization for invasion-management topics in the National Biosafety Science (Wu 2023), we identified five key issues: legislation and governance, transdisciplinary and proactive research, prevention and control actions, international cooperation, and translational education. These issues, albeit crosscutting, are viewed as five pillars for IAS management in China (Wu 2023), and they were ranked according to a classic approach discussing invasion issues (Pyšek et al. 2020), i.e., top-down (legislation and governance, international cooperation) and bottom-up (translational education) coupled with evidence-based research (transdisciplinary and proactive research) and effective activities (prevention and control actions). For each issue, we succinctly synthesized existing progress, diagnosed deficiencies, and proposed a set of priorities for management improvement; the deficiencies and priorities were based on collective review and debate among the authors, as well as consultation with experts in our professional network. The approach is similar to a Delphi-method procedure employed in recent horizon scans of invasion issues (Ricciardi et al. 2017). Priorities were assigned primarily considering their universality, urgency, and/or novelty; they are not presented in rank order mostly because of a need to act in synergy and also because our goal is to encourage further scrutiny, debate and supplementation that can spur the development of new policies to better serve IAS management for China.