Once regarded as a conservation pariah, Taiwan has leveraged multi-stakeholder cooperation to protect its natural species and habitats.

Taiwan’s struggle for international credibility in the 1990s made its poor reputation for wildlife conservation a considerable liability. While not a member of the United Nations, Taiwan was frequently reported by conservation groups for alleged violations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

In 1989, the government of then-President Lee Teng-hui oversaw the introduction of the Wildlife Conservation Act (WCA) — later credited with putting an end to the pangolin leather trade — which, at its peak between the 1950s and 1970s, saw up to 5,000 hides exported from Taiwan every month.

But progress was slow. It took international pressure to spur sweeping reforms, with the weight of U.S. federal law serving as a catalyst for Taiwan to both conform to international standards and avoid trade sanctions.

Under the Pelly Amendment to the Fishermen’s Protective Act, the U.S. government in 1993 certified that Taiwanese traders were undermining international conservation efforts such as CITES through the illicit trade in tiger and rhinoceros parts, often for traditional medicine or luxury possessions, opening the door to trade sanctions.

That same year, the parties to CITES censured Taiwan and called for the suspension of wildlife trade with Taipei. Meanwhile, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and other groups condemned Taiwan for widespread violations of provisions against shark finning. In 1994, former President Bill Clinton officially imposed wildlife trade sanctions against Taiwan, which galvanized Lee’s government to announce its own ban on rhino and tiger parts, effectively ending the trade within a few years.

Since then, Taiwan’s wildlife conservation efforts have improved dramatically. In fact, pangolin populations have rebounded, giving Taiwan what experts suggest is the greatest pangolin density per square kilometer in the world, according to a 2023 Taipei Times report. The rewilding efforts in Kenting National Park, Orchid Island, and Daqiu Island (near Matsu) of the Formosan sika deer — once coveted for its valuable skin and meat — have also proven successful. The sika had become extinct in 1969 when the last known wild one was killed.

In Kenting, the population grew from 22 domesticated deer introduced from Taipei Zoo in 1984 to around 3,800 individuals by 2024. The success of the reintroduction has even exceeded Kenting National Park’s ecological carrying capacity, with the resulting overpopulation necessitating fences to protect vegetation growing in rare habitats and vulnerable local ecosystems. That includes uplifted coral atolls, where reefs raised above sea level by tectonic forces have become engulfed in dense woodland. 

Other animals whose populations have stabilized and grown in recent years include iconic bird species such as the black-faced spoonbill. This migratory bird’s numbers rose to an all-time high of 4,719 this year — nearly 61% of the global total — following a decades-long battle to shield their wetland habitats from industrial expansion. Monitoring data from the Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency (FANCA) indicates that figures for the Formosan black bear — recognized as an unofficial mascot of Taiwan — have steadily risen since 2011 to an estimated 1,200 animals.   

Among the most influential factors has been improvements in education on wildlife conservation among the general public, says Chen Juei-ping, chairman of the Trust in Nature Foundation (TNF), a nongovernmental organization modeled on the United Kingdom’s National Trust.

“Education has definitely been most helpful,” he says. “But also, society and the world in general have changed.”

He cites the work of his former classmate Hwang Mei-hsiu — nicknamed “Taiwan’s Mother Bear” — as key to getting the public behind efforts to protect Taiwan’s largest native mammal. “When she started work on her master’s, she hardly saw a single bear in the wild, and had to study captive bears at the zoo,” says Chen. “At the time, the only people who saw them [regularly] were Indigenous, so people thought she was crazy!”

Yet thanks to the Taiwan Black Bear Conservation Association that Hwang founded in 2010 and an accompanying shift in public perceptions of black bears from menace or potential trophy to “national treasure,” the animals’ range has expanded to lower elevations, with sightings increasingly frequent.

Another animal that appears to be flourishing is the masked palm civet — a frequent visitor to Taiwan’s urban areas. “When I was a kid, you would never see these in the city,” Chen says.  

The TNF was originally established as the Taiwan Environmental Information Association in 2002. Since gaining foundation status in 2023, it has been able to establish public interest trusts on private farmlands in foothills and lowlands under the Ministry of Agriculture’s legal framework — some of the most neglected areas. Inspired by the National Trust target of restoring priority habitats on 10% of the UK’s land, TNF has set a more modest initial goal of safeguarding 3% of Taiwan’s natural habitats through grassroots action.

The group’s flagship project is the Nature Valley Environmental Education Base, a trust established on two hectares of land in Hsinchu’s Qionglin Township. Transformed from an abandoned orchard into a biodiverse secondary forest, Nature Valley is now home to over 500 protected species, including pangolins and crab-eating mongoose. Recent camera trap footage captured images of the vulnerable fairy pitta for the first time. This bird is designated as a “Rare and Valuable” protected species under the WCA, and Taiwan is a vital summer breeding ground for them.  

“Though we’ve seen only one nest with chicks in the past five years, we suspect there are more,” says Chen.   

He acknowledges that such commitments alone have not been decisive in the rebound of many animal species. Instead, changes in human behavior have made an outsized impact. Worldwide, Chen notes, hunting has decreased, as fewer younger people take up the practice. Animals like the Reeves muntjac — Taiwan’s smallest deer species — are instead stabilizing and replenishing as a result of a steady wave of cumulative protective measures: the end of commercial hunting under the WCA, tighter restrictions on Indigenous hunting, and the phasing out of steel-jaw traps, which culminated in a full ban in 2025. 

(PHOTO: GENE-SHENG TUNG, TNF)

Conserving the landscape

Meanwhile, outmoded agricultural practices that contributed to widescale lowland deforestation have gradually disappeared, says Chen. “In the past, logging and clearing the forest to grow vegetables was common, but the younger generation is no longer doing this.”

TNF’s prioritization of lowland and plains ecosystems is supported by Trevor Padgett, a plant ecologist and a doctoral candidate with the Taiwan International Graduate Program (TIGP), run jointly by Academia Sinica and Tunghai University. Padgett says that most of Taiwan’s original lowland primary forest has been lost.     

“This is not a Taiwan issue but a global one,” says Padgett. “You’ll notice that countries will say, ‘We’ve protected 95% of our mountain ecosystems,’ because that sounds great,” he explains. “But they don’t say what’s missing.” In most cases, it is the lowland areas that are prioritized for development.

In Pingtung’s Hengchun Peninsula, where Padgett is based, an overwhelming contributor to deforestation has been an invasive species, leucaena leucocephala, also known as the white leadtree. First introduced by the Dutch during the seventeenth century, the tree was prized as a source of firewood, charcoal and — through its high-protein leaves — livestock fodder. For centuries, it did not expand aggressively, but in the 1950s, a new, faster growing variety was introduced, which proliferated on abandoned land.

“It then began to encroach on natural forest and became a really substantial problem,” says Padgett, who specializes in parasitic plants. 

While the government provides funding for people to cut down the trees and plant native species, Padgett admits this is a losing battle. “It’s never going to go away,” he says. “There’s just too much.”

Misguided tree planting policies have also contributed to the introduction of destructive invasive pests to Taiwan, says Gene-Sheng Tung, an entomologist and researcher with the Forest Ecology Division at Taiwan Forestry Research Institute. 

While crossbreeding and hybrid varieties among horticulturalists likely played a decisive role, Tung also highlights a well-intentioned but possibly misjudged afforestation drive by successive Taiwan governments that included hybrid species. “This was seen as a ‘good’ issue — to plant some important trees,” says Tung, an expert in galling insects, which inject hormones or enzymes into plants and trees, causing growths, or galls, that are then used as protective shelters for the insects and their larvae. “But the ecosystem is always very complicated, and this gave these insects a chance [to thrive].”

One victim has been the coral tree, which is strongly tied to Austronesian migration routes from as far afield as Madagascar to Polynesia. For Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, the tree’s seasonal flowering serves as a “natural calendar,” says Tung, who has authored a series of books on ethnobotany in Taiwan.

“Since the early 2000s, we’ve lost about 80% of big coral trees in Taiwan,” says Tung, who identified the offender in a 2004 paper as the Erythrina gall wasp, likely introduced from Tanzania.

Galling insects have also wrought havoc on eucalyptus trees. Noting that, as a key source of paper, eucalyptus species predominate in artificial forests worldwide, Tung says such woodlands in Taiwan face a grave threat. “This is a complex group of insects, [some of] which are hard to identify,” he says. “Some don’t even have a name yet.”

Despite misgivings over knee-jerk rewilding programs, Tung says that targeted planting of key species can help strike a balance by encouraging public understanding of and involvement in maintaining ecosystems. This view is backed by Padgett, who currently has stewardship of a roughly eight-hectare plot of land in Pingtung, which was cleared of white leadtree by an elderly acquaintance with a passion for conservation.

The man — a friend of Padgett’s neighbor — was looking for people to donate trees to rewild the plot, and asked if Padgett would be willing to offer a couple of the 200-odd species he had growing around his house 

“I told him he could have them all,” says Padgett. “I’d love for them to have a home.”

Since then, the woodland has grown into a miniature nature reserve, with indirect benefits to conservation. Padgett leads tours, workshops, and planting activities with students, which he believes can play their part. “This 93-year-old man cut down this piece of forest,” he says. “If he hadn’t done it, this [invasive species] would still be there.” Now, says Padgett, people can enjoy and interact with native species and see how their displacement has affected Taiwan’s ecosystems. 

Evidence and engagement

For Tung, such instances of public involvement, particularly between different generations, are key to successful conservation. He stresses the need for dialogue between environmentalists and farmers using traditional practices.  

An example, Tung says, is Shuang-lianpi Wetlands, a partially protected lake and bird sanctuary in Yilan County’s Yuanshan Township. Friction between local villagers and environmentalists with the Society of Wilderness (SOW), an NGO, was resolved with mediation from Tung and his team working at nearby Fushan Botanical Garden, which at 410 hectares is the largest of Taiwan’s six nationally designated spaces.

Having successfully petitioned Yilan County Government to expropriate the lake area in the early 2000s, SOW had established an ecological education facility at Shuanglianpi, where activists frequently criticized local farming practices as environmentally unfriendly. Through the Fushan team’s assistance, collaboration was established on the cultivation of high-value herb crops used for perfume production through sustainable methods.       

“It’s now one of the biggest eco-friendly farms, with the [herb] crops mixed in with trees and small plants,” says Tung, emphasizing that the profitability of these cash crops convinced the farmers to adopt organic practices.

Hard data may be the best way to achieve cooperation between seemingly conflicting stakeholders, says Jerome Ko, a postdoctoral researcher at Taiwan Biodiversity Information Alliance (TBIA). Established in 2021 as a collaborative network of government agencies and research institutions, the TBIA integrates ecological information into a single open data platform.

The data has proven useful as a dispute resolution tool in smaller scale construction and engineering projects, says Ko. As companies undertaking projects of over one square kilometer must carry out a legally enforced environmental impact assessment, they will generally collect their own data to ensure they meet requirements. However, smaller projects are covered by a more policy-compliant, participatory framework known as an ecological check and investigation. These checks are particularly geared toward government projects — those with over 50% public funding are mandated to implement them. 

“This kind of rapid assessment usually has a very small budget and timeframe, with a need to make decisions very quickly,” says Ko. “Integrated and publicly shared data can make a really a big impact here.”

In addition to establishing an important channel for communications, TBIA data provides “a base of trust to build upon,” says Ko. Most of all, it can help temper the rhetoric around wildlife conservation.  

“In the past, there were strong debates and conflicts over these projects, hurting everyone’s feelings,” says Ko. “But with the data feeding into this platform, we have the basis for evidence-based solutions and decisions.”