Story | 07 6月, 2016

Yellow sea, moving towards Marine Eco-civilization: A field visit to Nantong Municipality, China

“Over the past 50 years, losses of up to 51% of coastal wetlands (including marshes) have occurred in China, 40% in Japan, 60% in the Republic of Korea, and more than 70% in Singapore.”

This is a stunning piece of information highlighted by the “IUCN situation analysis on East and Southeast Asian intertidal habitats, with particular reference to the Yellow Sea (including the Bohai Sea)” (IUCN Yellow Sea Report), commissioned by IUCN’s Species Survival Commission and IUCN Asia Regional Office in 2012. The Yellow Sea is one of the world's most biodiversity-rich areas and provides for rich fishing grounds and an important site for migratory birds, particularly those traveling along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF). However, the IUCN Yellow Sea Report also suggested that the fast pace of coastal land reclamation is the most pressing threat leading to mean losses of 35% of intertidal habitat area since the early 1980s across the six key areas of the Yellow Sea, one of which is Jiangsu and Shanghai coasts.

One can never fully believe in something if he or she has never personally seen it. This is an old Chinese saying that suggests only reading documents may not be adequate to fully understand what is going on in the Yellow Sea. But luckily, an opportunity appeared. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) China Office, as an International Organization delegate, were invited to participate in a media field reporting campaign named “Travel across Ecological Marine Territory” sponsored by the State Oceanic Administration of China, to visit Nantong Municipality of Jiangsu Province, a city located on the south coast of Yellow Sea, right to the north of Yangtze Estuary.

Nantong Municipality manages over 8,700 km2 marine area and about 205,000 ha intertidal flats, and has a coastal line of 206 km. As a city enjoying rapid industrialization and urbanization, Nantong is the one of the most economic developed cities in China. In recent years, the municipal governmental has put ecological development as a cornerstone of the municipal development, and started to implement a set of policies and projects to improve the maritime ecology, including pollution management, maritime environmental monitoring, ecological restoration, fishery enhancement etc.

The 3 day visit in May 2016 included visits to over 10 demonstration sites across coastal lines of the Nantong Municipality and numerous meetings and discussions with local stakeholders, including governments, companies, researchers and community people. We were hence to able to obtain a much clearer understanding of situation and conservation efforts of this coastal city of Yellow Sea.

Integrated Coastal Management (ICM): good start with great potential to develop

ICM, sometimes also called Integrated Coastal Zone Management, was born in 1992 during the Rio Earth Summit. It is a process for managing the coast with an integrated approach, regarding all aspects of the coastal zone, including geographical and political boundaries, to achieve sustainability.

Many good practices have been undertaken in Nantong in recent years towards the ICM:

  • Greater inland and coast integration, and closer terrestrial and maritime coordination: has been adopted as one of key principals by the municipal government of Nantong. Guided by this principal, the Municipal Marine and Fishery Bureau and the Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau have formally signed a MOU since 2014 to strengthen and formalize the cooperation of the two bureaus on inland and marine environment protection. Joint pollution monitoring and management, environmental impact assessment of infrastructure projects, information sharing and joint law enforcement etc. have all been undertaken since then. This is a good advance of cross-sectoral coordination. For a long time these two sectors, as the major environmental protection agencies for inland areas and for coastal and marine areas respectively, had been working solely within their administrative boundaries and not collaborating with each other.

 

  • Decision support systems and performance based maritime pollution management: have been established in Nantong. Marine monitoring stations have been established in all coastal counties within the municipality. River monitoring stations have also been established for all 17 inland rivers flowing into the sea. Marine and water monitoring data are exchanged and cross referred, in order to support the performance based water quality management that also includes PES (or Eco-compensation in China) mechanisms, with clarified upstream and downstream mandates. This has effectively managed the marine pollution from land sources, which is identified as a major threat to intertidal flats by the IUCN Yellow Sea Report.

 

  • Business sector participation in coastal management: has been significantly developed in Nantong. As a rather industrialized municipality, companies and industrial parks are playing a key role in Nantong but also on restoration and conservation, supported by municipal government. The Yangkou Economic Development Area in Rudong County of Nantong, an industrial park located on the coast with over 100 companies, has established the first real time pollution monitoring system in the province and developed associated management arrangements, to oversee the pollution loads of all its companies and to respond to any emergencies. The Coastal Industrial Park of Qidong County has invested over 400 million RMB, to establish over 2 million m2 green spaces, to restore river channels, and to restore saline-alkali soil through physicochemical and biological approaches. The Zhongyang Group, a leading Chinese fishery company, has established a Rare Fish Breeding Center within its big production site in Nantong and been helping with the ex situ conservation of Yangtze Alligator and Chinese Sturgeon etc.

While these are good ICM practices and should be encouraged and disseminated, there is still great room for further development. Within the Nantong Municipality, other government departments, such as the land management bureau, the forestry bureau, the agriculture bureau, and the communications and transportation bureau could be further involved in the ICM processes, as they also have responsibilities related to the coasts and marine. Local communities, though mostly employed by industries now and no longer famers and fishermen, may play a big role in certain ICM related activities, such as restoration. Also in a long term, collaboration could be sought with the neighboring municipalities of Nantong.

Blue economy: promising but to be well managed

The coastal zone has long provided a wealth of services to humans. Intertidal habitats are amongst the most productive ecosystems on earth. They provide safe spawning areas and nurseries for countless species of fish and crustaceans on which coastal fisheries depend. Beautiful shorelines offer wonderful and inspiring recreational and tourism opportunities, based on which local economics can develop.

Green development and blue economy have been the priority of Nantong, in addition to industrial and manufacturing development. The visit to Nantong observed a few very interesting examples:

  • Coastal recreation and tourism: due to its adjacent location to Shanghai, the largest and most developed city in China, Yuantuojiao Recreation Area (YRA) in Qidong County of Nantong Municipality has been developing fairly rapidly. Besides building of hotels, restaurants and recreational facilities, ensuring a good environment and ecology is a top priority and considered as a comparative advantage by the YRA and its investors. A few big projects have been implemented to protect and restore the shorelines. Strict pollution management, employment of locals, environmental education for visitors have all been well practiced. The area is now generating three times more income for local economy, than fish farming in the past.

 

  • Integrating solar power generation and fish farming: is a very interesting practice being undertaken by Tongwei Fish-Solar Company in Rudong. Solar PVs are established above coastal fishponds after a careful, scientific based design, so that fish farming and solar power generation could be simultaneously conducted. Advanced technologies are adopted to apply the feed and add oxygen to the fishponds, which could be controlled by a smart device according to monitoring data from sensors in the ponds. Wastewater management system has been established and used to mitigate the pollution and facilitate nutrient recycling. Through such an integrated system, a gross output of 750,000 RMB per ha could potentially be achieved.

There are also other good practices in Nantong, like developing seaweed products. However, green development and building blue economy should not be measured in economic terms. The externality is to be identified and carefully managed. The wind power generation for example, a major nation-wide initiative, is posing threat to birds, and many economic activities taking advantage of the provisional and cultural and recreational services of coastal areas shall not result in environmental deterioration, in terms of pollution, invasive species and habitat destruction. Marine fishery, though already managed through seasonal fishing ban normally from June to September each year, is still at stake. According to local stakeholders, there were significantly less birds after wind power stations were established, and the harvest of small yellow croaker (Larimichthys polyactis), for which the Yellow Sea used to be famous, is still very limited, as a result of past years’ over-fishing.

Intertidal flats: conservation improving yet challenges remaining

Intertidal flats provide ecosystem services such as food, shoreline stabilization, protection from storm events, maintenance of biodiversity and are often at the center of social activities. The intertidal flats of the Yellow Sea are particularly of international importance, as important habitats for a lot of globally threatened waterbirds migrating on the EAAF. However, this was only in the 1990s that the ornithological importance of the Yellow Sea became clear, when a lot of such areas had already been destructed due to land reclamation, a process of creating new land from ocean, riverbeds, or lake beds, practiced worldwide.

There have been considerable reclamation activities implemented in Nantong Municipality. For example, in Rudong County from 1950’s, almost 40,000 ha land has been created from reclamation. This on one hand to great extent helped solve economic constraints of limited lands, but on the other hand posed ecological problems, such as destruction of the habitats of birds and other coastal species, and degradation of ecosystem functions and services.

The local stakeholders, especially the municipal government of Nantong fortunately has increasingly recognized the importance of intertidal flats and started to conserve them in a much more careful manner. Small Protected Areas have been established in Rudong county to protect critical habitats for threatened birds, including the Spoon-billed Sandpiper (Eurynorhynchus pygmeus), a bird categorized as Critically Endangered (CR) by the IUCN Red List of Threated Species. The planning of the Tongzhou Bay Development Area has particularly set aside the costal wetland as untouched area.

However, great challenges remain, as land reclamation will mostly likely continue. According Jiangsu Coastal Development Plan (2009–2020), over 180,000 ha reclamation is planned, relevant to intertidal flats. Where and how this new reclamation is going to be implemented remains an uncertain and could potentially be challenging to intertidal flats of the Yellow Sea and its ecosystems.

Towards Marine Eco-civilization in China: how could IUCN help

Eco-civilization development, an approach seeking great harmony between human and nature, has been regarded as a national priority of China in its pursuit of sustainable development, and therefore gained nation-wide support. In the 13th Five Year Plan (FYP) of SOA, Marine Eco-civilization development is also a top priority. Managing resources sustainably, pushing for green development, regulating economic activities have all been listed in the FYP. It presents a good opportunity and backstop for establishing ICM and development the blue economy in Nantong and other coast Chinese municipalities in Yellow Sea and other seas.

Cascading the national policy to on the ground actions is always not easy, especially for a big country like China. Knowledge and capacity gaps, hierarchical layers and institutional boundaries, local interests in economic development, lack of strong evidence base for good practices all require time and efforts to address. The international organizations like IUCN, however, are well positioned to help, given their experiences in linking science, policy and practice worldwide.

IUCN, the largest and oldest global conservation network, considers three programmatic priorities in its programmatic strategies to achieve its mission, a just world that values and conserves nature: value of nature, nature’s governance and nature-based solutions. All these approaches could play a big role to support to achieve marine eco-civilization in China:

  • Valuing nature: filling the knowledge gap of stakeholders at all levels in terms of the value and services that the coasts and oceans provide for us;
  • Nature’s governance: exploring practical models of ICM;
  • Nature-based solutions: demonstrating and building the evidence base for stakeholders.

IUCN defined the term “Sustainable Development” in 1980’s and brought it to the world. We are now happy to work with Chinese stakeholders and partners, including SOA, to further define Eco-civilization and again, bring it to the international audience. The work is challenging, but important for this planet at crossroad.

By Zhang Yan, IUCN China

About the “Travel across Ecological Marine Territory”

“Travel across Ecological Marine Territory” is a campaign sponsored by the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) of China, with the theme of “Promoting Green Development and Ecologically Managing the Ocean”. The campaign will organize media and conservation groups to site visit seven municipalities along the coastal area of China in 2016, to experience marine ecological civilization development on the ground, and to collect field stories of coastal restoration and integrated marine management. The visit to Nantong Municipality was the second of such visits, following the first one to Weihai, Shandong Province and followed by the third visit to Huizhou, Guangdong Province.