Experts call for more policy efforts to protect marine environment

Experts have called for more policy efforts to draw private capital into marine conservation, as the country forges ahead with the arduous task of remediating its damaged marine environment.

They made the remarks in a forum on marine protection in Rongcheng, Shandong province on Saturday.

Yu Yonghai, a researcher with the National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, noted a series of challenges the country is confronted with in conserving the marine environment.

Currently, about 70 percent of sandy seacoast and most of the mud tidal flat in open sea areas in China have been eroded, a major factor to blame for the degradation of the country's coastal ecosystem, he said.

He said intensive development in the offshore areas has resulted in a sharp decrease in coastal wetlands and natural shorelines and has seriously damaged the habitats for some key marine organisms.

From 2002 to 2018, a total of 275,000 hectares of land were reclaimed from the sea for industrial development and for construction of ports and towns, he said.

Compared with the 1950s, the area of coastal wetland has decreased by about 57 percent. "This has damaged some key habitats, posing a severe threat to biodiversity," he stressed.

He said the country has rolled out a series of measures to enhance coastal ecological conservation since the turn of the new millennium.

From 2016 to 2017, for instance, the country invested almost 5.7 billion yuan ($776 million) in a remediation campaign targeting bay areas, he said. Some 270 kilometers of shorelines, 130 hectares of sand beach and 5,000 hectares of costal wetland were restored.

Marine remediation programs that have been launched in the country, however, are highly scattered, he said, and the work has not yet been done in a systematic and comprehensive manner.

The country, for example, still has a long way to go in restoring its mangrove and sea grass ecosystems, he emphasized.

The size of mangrove foreasts in China decreased to about 22,000 hectares in 2001, compared with 42,000 in the 1950s, he said. Despite the country's efforts in artificial cultivation and remediation, the size of such forests has increased only about 27,000 hectares.

Currently, the marine remediation programs in many regions highly depend on government investment, he said. With little private capital involved, the overall investment into marine remediation is still very limited.

Aside from introducing a mechanism to compensate for marine conservation efforts, Yu said he looks forward to seeing the government take more measures to broaden financing channels for such efforts.

While encouraging financial institutes to engage in more marine remediation programs, the government should also strive to explore viable modes that can effectively mobilize private capital to participate, he said.

Currently, the country's fund for marine conservation is sufficient to cope with marine environmental problems, said Wang Guang, a researcher from South China Institute of Environmental Sciences.

Wang noted Eco-environmental Oriented Development as a potential mode that can help address the problem.

Known as EOD, the mode integrates lucrative business programs with environmental projects that can hardly yield economic return. The gains from the lucrative businesses will have to be invested into environmental programs to strike a balance between development and protection.

The 52 prefecture-level coastal cities across the country have seen their marine economy continue to boom in the past 10 years. Currently, marine economy represents about 9 percent of their overall GDP, he said.

These cities' need to boost economic development and enhance conservation in their total 283 bay areas offers a solid foundation to introduce EOD, Wang said.