Science magazine features China’s island-building

MANILA, Philippines - A magazine has featured China’s island building projects in the South China Sea as destroying reefs and endangering the marine environment.

In an article in a recent issue of Science Magazine, Christina Larson wrote that the geopolitical maneuvering in the South China Sea (SCS) is taking a heavy toll on the marine environment, scientists believe.

The Spratlys – called Nansha by the Chinese – that include islets, coral reefs and atolls, have become the focus of a territorial dispute between China and its neighbors.

“To the dismay of other countries bordering the SCS — Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei — China claims most of the sea, and it is bolstering its claims with a massive land filling effort to transform some of the atolls into full-fledged islands,” Larson said.

By piling sand, gravel and dead coral onto reef flats to create new land and dredging shipping channels nearby, she said, China has destroyed large areas of reefs and their biodiversity that serve as fish nurseries in much of the South China Sea.

The Philippines said the South China Sea is in an environmental crisis. 

With challenges in the region to marine resources management, such as the destruction of coral reefs in the South China Sea due to massive reclamation and its attendant economic costs, the Philippines said it should be addressed by all parties concerned in order to realize Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SD Goal 14, which deals with oceans, seas and marine resources.

Edgardo Gomez, professor emeritus of the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute and National Scientist, applied calculations of ecological economics to estimate that the 800 hectares of ocean filling or reclamation done by China that subsequently destroyed centuries-old coral reef ecosystems amounted to a loss worth $280 million. 

“These are losses to the Vietnamese, the Filipinos, the Malaysians, the Indonesians and to the Chinese themselves,” Gomez said.

He said that because of the great value of the West Philippine Sea to many countries in the Coral Triangle Region and beyond, “all countries that are contributing to the degradation and destruction of the shallow water ecosystems must stop their activities that are known to be detrimental to the productivity and biodiversity of the waters of Southeast Asia.”