The Yangtze River has long been an emblem of the ecological toll of China’s modernization. Since the 1950s, dam-building, mining, industrial pollution and overfishing have depleted fisheries there to a fraction of their former size. Some species have been driven to extinction, most notably the Yangtze River dolphin, or baiji, last seen in 2002.
Now the river is offering a glimmer of hope that wildlife in such a heavily modified river can be revived. It also points at the dramatic measures that might be necessary to do it.
Beginning in 2021, the Chinese government imposed a 10-year ban on all commercial fishing in the Yangtze River basin, a region roughly the size of Mexico. It was the most sweeping freshwater fishing restrictions ever imposed on such a massive scale.
New research suggests that within years, this unparalleled experiment showed signs of working. The results “provide hope that in an era of global biodiversity decline, ambitious political decisions that support large-scale restoration efforts can help reverse the ecosystem damages of the past,” wrote the authors of a new paper in Science.
Previously, the river had been a cautionary tale about how not to manage fisheries. Driven chiefly by habitat destruction and overfishing, catches by fishers crashed from more than 400,000 tons in the mid-1950s to just 66,000 tons in 2016. The Chinese paddlefish and the baiji vanished. The river’s other trademark aquatic mammal, the Yangtze finless porpoise, dwindled to fewer than 500 animals.
The fishing ban is part of a broader initiative aimed at restoring some of the ecosystem functions in a river basin that’s home to roughly 30% of the nation’s population and 40% of its economic production. In addition to the fishing restrictions, the government has created protected areas and spent more than $300 billion in restoration and environmental management over the last decade.
To see whether the fishing ban helped, Chinese scientists, in collaboration with U.S., Canadian and French researchers, pursued an elaborate program to count fish along parts of the river. Shortly before the fishing ban, from 2018 to 2020, and again when the ban was in place from 2021 to 2023, researchers set up gill nets along 57 2-kilometer sections of the river representing different levels of disturbance in the surrounding land. Then they counted every fish caught, more than 47,000 in all from 115 species. They also collected detailed information about water quality, land use, fishing activity and weather conditions.
The data revealed signs of recovery within just a few years. Total fish biomass more than doubled and the variety of species caught in the nets increased by 13%. Larger bodied fish in particular grew in numbers. Some fish, such as the slender tongue sole, expanded their range further upstream. Numbers of endangered Yangtze sturgeon, Chinese sucker and tube fish all showed hints of increasing. The estimated number of finless porpoises rose from 445 in 2017 to 595 in 2022.
The fishing ban stood out as the overwhelming factor behind these changes, when scientists weighed it against other factors such as shifts in water quality.
While this showed how quickly an ecosystem can respond to protections, it’s not all rosy, given the continued pressures of climate change, the intractability of habitat loss, and the possibility that commercial fishing might eventually return.
The scientists cautioned that “the future of the Yangtze River biodiversity remains uncertain and sensitive to emerging threats.” That includes changes in water management and dams driven by pressure from climate change.
Scientists have also suggested that while an end to commercial fishing could restore some of the fish, much of the damage stems from habitat loss that won’t be reversed so easily. In a 2022 paper titled “Can the ‘10-year fishing ban’ rescue biodiversity of the Yangtze River?” a group of Chinese scientists wrote that overfishing likely accounted for just 30% of the total decline, while habitat loss represented 70%.
The ban also comes with a high price. It was coupled with the removal of more than 100,000 fishing boats, the resettling of more than 230,000 fishers.
And what happens when the 10-year ban ends? The researchers wrote that they were “cautiously optimistic” that the recovery could prove durable. But they also worried that “this progress could easily be reversed by reinitiating commercial fishing.”
Xiong, et. al. “Fishing ban halts seven decades of biodiversity decline in the Yangtze River.” Science. Feb. 12, 2026.
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