Zhang Jian, a rural Chinese citizen living in the greater Kunming municipal region, readied himself for resettlement. After the state zoned his village for conservation, the next step for him and his rural comrades appeared to be resettlement into an urban high-rise apartment. Ecological migration is the official term used by the Chinese government for state-led processes of resettlement in the name of environmental protection. Journalists and researchers have predominantly focused on such resettlement programs in China’s west, particularly those related to grazing and anti-desertification campaigns. Less attention has been given to the ecological migrations occurring in China’s municipal regions, which are precipitating the movement of millions of rural landholders into, mainly, high-rise apartments.

As countries prepare to gather for the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in December 2022, the stakes for global biodiversity couldn’t be higher. Over the last half century, global wildlife population sizes plummeted by 60 percent. A 2019 UN report, one among many, warned that the current global response to this accelerating loss of species is insufficient and that “transformative changes are needed to restore and protect nature.”