Rapid economic development of China’s coastal regions, which produce 60 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, has also enclosed once lush wetlands with a string of seawalls longer than the Great Wall, raising serious environmental concerns.
The thousands of kilometres of seawalls constructed in recent decades threaten international biodiversity and regional ecological security, according to an international report by sustainability researchers from China, New Zealand, the United States and the Netherlands, released on Friday.
“Reclamation of China’s coastal wetlands is estimated to cause annual losses of US$31 billion in ecosystem services [processes of nature such as providing clean water, replenishing oxygen and creating soil],” the report said.
Artificial seawalls now stretch along some 60 per cent of the mainland’s coastline, the report said, destroying or severely disrupting the natural function of lush wetland, much of which is earmarked for reclamation. This increases pollution that threatens water bird populations, degrades inshore and oceanic environments, and leaves coastal populations more vulnerable to extreme weather events such as typhoons due to loss of salt marsh wetlands.
For decades, constructing seawalls for reclamation was seen as an effective way to obtain land for farms and factories to help sustain and raise living standards for China’s population.
From 1950 to 2000, China enclosed 24,000 hectares of coastal wetlands a year – a loss of 50 per cent of the nation’s sea marshes, says the report. Between 2006 and 2010, reclamation accelerated to 40,000 hectares per year. Only 5.8 million hectares of China’s wetlands remains.
The combined length of the walls has also increased 3.4 times in the past 20 years, reaching 11,000km in 2010.
The central government acknowledges the issue and has sought to rectify it, for example, with the National Wetland Conservation Action Plan of 2000, and the National Wetland Protection Plan of 2004.
“There are some issues in wetland conservation, such as the lack of wetland conservation legislation at national level, local governments over-emphasising economic development and short-term economic benefits, and different government agencies having conflicting targets for the wetland use,” said Zhijun Ma, a professor of life sciences at Fudan University and one of the research paper’s authors.
Ma and other sustainability scientists say that China’s main criterion for assessing the success of local governments has been centred around GDP growth, and the political system allows ecological damage in favour of continued development.
“Although the central government has recently proposed adding environmental performance to the assessment criteria, the effectiveness of such a proposed change remains to be seen,” the paper said.
2014 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd.