Biodiversity mainstreaming remains among the most persistent gaps in global environmental governance. China’s national park reforms provide a large-scale empirical test of mainstreaming in practice. By unifying fragmented protected areas, consolidating governance mandates, aligning cross-sector policies, and formalizing inclusive stewardship, the reforms have delivered measurable gains in flagship species recovery, ecosystem service resilience, and community participation. Yet its transformative potential is constrained by limited penetration into non-conservation sectors, uneven adaptive capacity, and incomplete social integration. We distill three transferable principles—coherence, consolidation, and co-production—and outline instruments to embed biodiversity imperatives beyond protected areas into infrastructure, agriculture, and regional planning. Achieving the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework will require moving beyond isolated conservation enclaves toward integrated policy ecologies that can durably reconcile biodiversity outcomes with equitable human well-being.
Zhong et al. (2025) studied this question.