The fifth World Conference on Biosphere Reserves (WCBR) will be held in Hangzhou, the capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, from September 22 to 27, 2025, according to the UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) International Co-ordinating Council (ICC).

The 35th session of the MAB-ICC opened in Paris on Monday, where Hangzhou was designated to host both the congress and the 37th session of the MAB-ICC.

This will be the first time the conference will be held in China and the first time it will be held in the Asia-Pacific region.

"We are looking for a venue where we'll be able to combine the discussion of CBD (Convention on Biological Diversity), impact on the MAB program, and climate change impact on the MAB program. We thought the best place to go is China, and that's what formed the unanimous agreement of the member states," said Adeshola Adepoju, chair of the MAB-ICC.

The MAB Program is a large intergovernmental scientific program launched by UNESCO in 1971, focusing on promoting the harmonious integration between people and nature by combining natural and social sciences with economics, education and capacity-building.

Based on the MAB Program, the World Biosphere Reserve Network (WBRN) is the largest and oldest collection of nature reserves in the UNESCO system. At present, it has 738 world biosphere reserves in 134 countries and regions, covering a total area of around five percent of the Earth's land surface.

The WCBR is the largest and most extensive international meeting in the MAB program system. It is held every 10 years or so to take stock of the development of the MAB Program and the WBRN in the last phase and formulate a development strategy and action plan for the next stage in combination with the external situation. So far, it has been held in Minsk, Seville, Madrid and Lima.

China formally joined the UNESCO MAB Program in 1973, and MAB China was established in 1978 with the support of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in collaboration with other ministries engaged in the administration of environmental conservation, forestry, agriculture, education, ocean and atmosphere.