Chinese construction companies have been banned from moving coral to make space for construction projects.
The Ministry of Natural Resources issued a notice this month strengthening a requirement for coral reef ecosystems to be protected and restored in situ, and banning the practice of transplanting them elsewhere for restoration. China has lost 80% of its coral reefs since the 1950s, but rigorous monitoring since 2002 has gradually fostered a system of conservation and restoration.
Previously, coral reefs affected by development projects were sometimes relocated. In July last year, for example, coral in waters around the port expansion project for an international container hub at Yangpu, Hainan province, were transplanted to the Linqiangshi Island coral reef nature reserve in Danzhou, according to media reports.
The new approach ends such practices by requiring that construction works avoid areas of coral wherever possible. For projects of national significance where particular islets or areas of sea cannot be bypassed, developers have to demonstrate the need to encroach on reefs. This, the ministry said, should include “assessing the damage to and impact on resources and the ecology and drawing up specific, viable objectives and measures for conservation and restoration, so as to minimise the destruction of ecosystems in the course of construction”.
Conservation and restoration work in such cases will have to be carried out promptly and in situ, during construction, and then managed and monitored for at least three years to ensure the ecosystem has fundamentally recovered.
The state we’re in
The amount of fish harvested from aquaculture has overtaken wild-capture fisheries for the first time, according to a huge biannual report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Manuel Barange, director of the FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Division, said this was “a great result because it means that we can continue to increase the production of aquatic foods without increasing the impact on the marine environment, as less than 40% of aquaculture is produced in marine waters”.
The FAO’s State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (Sofia) report notes that aquaculture produced 51% of the 185 million tonnes of aquatic animals harvested in 2022 and 97% of 38 million tonnes of algae.
China is a huge part of this, producing 40% of the overall 223 million tonnes of seafood.
The country dominates aquaculture and continues to be the largest player in capture fisheries, accounting for 14.3% of the global harvest of 92 million tonnes in 2022. But the FAO notes that China is among those reducing the size of its fishing fleet, amid a push for greater sustainability.
China’s marine catches declined by around 18% between 2015 and 2022. “A continuation of a catch-reduction policy beyond the 13th and 14th five-year plans (2016–2020 and 2021–2025) is expected to result in further decreases in coming years, although 2022 marine capture catches were broadly similar to those in 2021,” states the Sofia report.