As the director of the Nature Conservancy's fast-growing China programme and one of China's most prominent environmental activists, Niu needs every ounce of energy she can muster. In the past two years the programme has more than doubled in size to 53 people. Although its activities previously have focused on the southwestern province of Yunnan, the conservancy has recently opened a Beijing office to give it greater influence on national environmental policy.

As she picks at her pomelo and yams from the hotel's breakfast buffet, 42-year-old Niu talks about what she's accomplished since moving back to her native Yunnan from New Zealand in August 1997 to set up the Nature Conservancy's first China office. Funded with just US$2,000 (HK$15,600) in cash from the conservancy, Niu began a bootstrap operation out of her family home, a traditional courtyard house in the picturesque old town of Lijiang, about 400 kilometres northwest of the provincial capital of Kunming. Lijiang, with its canals, willow trees and tiled wooden houses, had been devastated by an earthquake the previous year. Rebuilding was under way and officials were open to fresh thinking.

Niu is a member of the Naxi minority who dominate Lijiang, a city of about 1.1 million people. Trained as a veterinarian and working as a government official, a Ford Foundation grant took her to Bangkok in the early 1990s. There, studies at the Asia Institute of Technology kindled an interest in the environment.

But when she returned to China, Niu was discouraged by the lack of environmental opportunities. By the mid-1990s she had given up on China. With her husband, a former quarantine official who also now works for the conservancy, Niu and their two young daughters emigrated to New Zealand. But just seven months later the Virginia, United States-based conservancy, lured her back home as head of an ambitious programme to save one of the world's richest natural areas from destruction.

Northwest Yunnan, which local officials say is the inspiration for the book Shangri-la, is one of the world's great wild places. Four of Asia's largest rivers, including the Yangtze and the Mekong, pass through here, separated by just 90 kilometres of rugged terrain, carrying water for one of every 10 people in the world. The forbidding mountain ranges are the northern edge of the Himalayas. Because it is both high and close to the equator, the area is unique among temperate areas to have escaped the ravages of the most recent Ice Age 15,000 years ago. The result is a stunning array of animals and some 7,000 plant species found nowhere else on earth.

But when Niu returned to Shangri-la it was in danger of becoming Paradise Lost. On top of the relentless pressure of China's population - three million of whom live in northwestern Yunnan - came a growing hunger for natural resources. Close to 500,000 of northwest Yunnan's people live on incomes of less than US$80 a year. In their scramble for survival, they've wreaked increasing havoc on the environment. With a rural family of four needing six tonnes of firewood a year for cooking and heating, alternatives to traditional ways of living were urgently needed.

Niu was sure the Nature Conservancy couldn't solve the region's problems on its own. An unusual pact, inked in February 1999 between the Yunnan provincial government and the conservancy, committed the two sides to a scientific study of northwestern Yunnan's environment, at a cost of US$500,000 and involving hundreds of scientists, mostly from the government. They mapped the areas of greatest biodiversity in this great breeding zone of flora and fauna and identified hotspots that were under particular threat. Then the government and the conservancy came up with protection strategies and ideas for sustainable conservation-based development.

The recommendations were written into the province's official five-year plan, the guiding document for all development.

``Working with the government gave us great leverage,'' says Niu. The study also helped prompt Unesco to single out 44,000 kilometres of upper Yunnan as the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage site. For its part, once the study was finished, the conservancy focused on a number of small projects, such as helping locals start an eco-lodge for tourists in the scenic uplands above Lijiang. The organisation is now focused on five high-priority sites for protection. It's working with the government on three new nature reserves and improved management plans for two others.

At first, suspicious Chinese officials had wondered why an American environmental group was so keen on China - given northwest Yunnan's proximity to Tibet (some of the area is culturally Tibetan) - and some asked if this was a cover for spying. Back in Virginia, sceptical conservancy board members wondered why Niu was keen on setting up a joint venture with the Chinese government. The Nature Conservancy flourishes because it is deliberately non-confrontational and relies on science, not emotion, to bolster its arguments. For a time, China looked like it would be a challenge too far for this very American organisation.

Niu and the Nature Conservancy have benefited from some powerful political backing. Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who chairs the conservancy's board, takes a personal interest in Niu's project. She stays at the Paulson apartment when fundraising trips take her to New York. Paulson and his wife Wendy took an arduous trekking trip into the Tibetan area of Yunnan two years ago.

Paulson also used his considerable clout to arrange an unprecedented two-hour-plus meeting with Jiang Zemin for Niu and the Nature Conservancy in early 2002. That meeting did wonders for the group's credibility among officials. It also set the stage for Niu to set up a Beijing office as part of a strategy to influence national environmental policies.

Talking about China's environmental nightmare has become something of a ritual. The ``Get Dirty, Get Rich, Get Clean'' policy is a growing threat to China and the world. Since taking power nearly two years ago, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have made encouraging noises about the need for more balanced development. Recently, a number of mainland officials have talked more bluntly about the need for sustainable development. But there's a long way between pious pronouncements in Beijing and the on-the-ground reality of people struggling to survive. The hardscrabble world of illegal logging, toxic waste dumping, dirty factories and smoking power plants is a fact of life.

The Beijing operation, though, is starting to pay dividends. The conservancy is working with the National People's Congress to draft a law setting up a nationwide policy on nature reserves - the first time, says Niu, that the congress has turned to a non-government organisation to help it draft legislation. The conservancy has also enlisted the State Development Planning Commission, State Forestry Administration and the State Environmental Protection Administration to help China meet the requirements of the International Convention on Bio-diversity. The Nature Conservancy will pay half of the US$6 million cost for the three-to-four-year project as well as provide technical assistance.

``It will have a huge impact, helping China lay a foundation for further action,'' contends Niu.

There are big challenges ahead, she admits. Ed Norton, a senior conservancy official who has lived in Kunming for five years, is moving to Europe and that will put even more pressure on Niu and her team as they try to straddle the demands of working in a very Chinese environment for an American organisation. And there are the larger issues of how to grow the organisation and pick the right targets in a country where the environmental crisis is overwhelming.

Getting projects to work on a scale that will make a difference is a huge challenge. The Nature Conservancy is in the early stages of a plan to cut wood consumption by 75 per cent, over the course of a decade, in environmentally sensitive areas. Pilot projects have been done on alternative fuel sources such as biogas stoves, which use pig and even human waste as fuel. The Yunnan provincial government is spending about US$472,000 on more than 43,000 energy-efficient stoves and 4,500 biogas units in the proposed Laojun Mountain nature reserve alone. The United Nations, the conservancy and a private foundation have chipped in for a US$2.2 million fund to develop rural energy industries, giving locals a chance to profit from appropriate energy, from solar power to micro-hydropower units throughout, northwest Yunnan.

The only downside to a conversation with this remarkable woman is the fact that this generic hotel buffet offers little in the way of sumptuous Naxi food, which traditionally includes an array of remarkable vegetables, tofu and small amounts of yuntui, the justly famous traditional Yunnan ham. Niu has finished her fruit and a small bowl of congee, washing it all down with Lipton's tea. We could be in any of hundreds of hotels throughout China but Niu is one of a kind, a woman who, one hopes, represents the future of China's environment and not just a fruitless attempt to stem the tide of despoliation.