Opinion
Land Reclamation Spree
Excessive land reclamation posed a severe threat to the sea’s sustainable development
  ·  2017-11-16  ·   Source: NO. 46 NOVEMBER 16, 2017

On August 22, the State Council dispatched inspection teams to investigate excessive land reclamation at sea in coastal provinces such as Liaoning, Hebei, Jiangsu and Fujian and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. However, reclamation projects along the country’s coastline is unlikely to be curbed as a result of this move.

In addition to a strict land use quota, arable land development usually involves huge compensation and other complicated issues. Comparatively, reclaiming land from the sea costs much less and incurs fewer problems. Such manmade lands bring huge profits to developers as they are usually located in densely-populated regions or on the seaside and have developed transportation networks. Even land prices of their neighboring areas will inflate. High economic returns thus lead to more and more land reclamation projects.

More importantly, these projects tend to be big, which helps grow the local economy and increase tax revenues, beneficial for both local governments and businesses. But their damage to the coastal ecosystem should not be underestimated.

Statistics from the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) reveal that the average area of annual land reclamation stands at about 10,000 hectares in recent years. But industry experts point out that due to poor management, the real acreage could be much bigger.

According to the SOA, over-development of sea resources and the lack of effective and unified management have led to dramatic shrinking of China’s coastline. In some cases, the scale of land reclamation exceeds the actual demand and the reclaimed land is thus left idle. All these have posed a severe threat to the sea’s sustainable development.

More worrying is that the absence of explicit laws and regulations to regulate land reclamation and rein in excessive projects have made it easy for developers to escape supervision and punishment, which in turn expose the sea to huger damage.

(This is an edited excerpt of an article published in Caixin Weekly on October 30)

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