city had to close down.
Nothing like China’s current growth explosion has happened in history. It is hard to get your head around the scale of it: during the first quarter of this century, half of all the world’s new buildings will be erected in China, and fifty thousand of them will be skyscrapers – the equivalent to ten New Yorks. It is similarly hard to take in fully the terrible environmental price that is being paid for this, which began to become visible to the outside world about a decade ago (a key moment being in 2007, when China surpassed the US in carbon dioxide emissions and thus became officially the world’s biggest polluter). It is now increasingly documented, though, and you can pick out jaw-dropping figures at will: in 2006 the heavily industrialised provinces of Guangdong and Fujian discharged nearly 8.3 billion tonnes of sewage into the ocean, without treatment, a 60 per cent increase from 2001; by 2020 the volume of urban rubbish in China is expected to reach 400 million tonnes, equivalent to the figure for the entire world in 1997; and so on. But perhaps a single example should stand for all, that of the baiji, the legendary freshwater dolphin, a true wildlife treasure, ‘the goddess of the Yangtze’: by 2006, so gross and extreme had the industrialisation and pollution of the great river become that the baiji had been driven to extinction.
A major concern, however, is not only what China’s frenzied growth is doing to its own environment, but what it is also doing to environments beyond its borders. The country is now not only the world’s biggest importer of timber, it is also the biggest importer of illegally logged timber, and thus ‘exporting deforestation’; its insatiable demand for wood is the major driver of rainforest destruction around the world. Its demand for ivory, especially since it was allowed to take part in the internationalivory auction of 2008, is behind the renewed upsurge in the slaughter of African elephants; its demand for pangolins, or scaly anteaters, prized both for their meat and their scales, used in traditional Chinese medicine, has meant that all eight pangolin species are now threatened with extinction; its demand for tiger bones for medicinal use is similarly threatening the world’s surviving wild tigers, while its demand for shark fins is behind the booming and unsustainable slaughter of the world’s sharks (one estimate is that 73 million are killed annually for shark fin soup, increasingly served or ordered as a wealth-displaying dish by the burgeoning Chinese middle class). But the most far-reaching effect yet beyond its borders may be in what it is doing to the Yellow Sea, the vital flyway stopping place for the migrant shorebirds of twenty-two countries.
For China’s wholly unchallengeable growth imperative, and the fact that six hundred million of its people, nearly a tenth of the world’s population, live in river catchments which drain into the Yellow Sea, mean that the pressure to reclaim the tidal flats along its coastline is irresistible, and it is proceeding with ever-increasing rapidity. You can argue that such reclamation has always been done, but as a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2012 makes clear, it is the speed and the scale at which it is being done now which is the problem. Since 1980 China has reclaimed no less than 51 per cent of all its coastal wetlands (this includes habitats such as mangroves and sea grass beds), and South Korea, 60 per cent (of a lower base). Of the key areas of tidal mudflats on which the shorebirds of the flyway depend, around the Yellow Sea as a whole, 35 per cent has already gone, and the remainder will go soon. It is likely that every major Yellow Sea tidal flat now has a development plan attached to it.
The situation, barely noticed by the world at large, is regarded by environmentalists involved as a wildlife catastrophe in the making, indeed, it is already
Nothing like China’s current growth explosion has happened in history. It is hard to get your head around the scale of it: during the first quarter of this century, half of all the world’s new buildings will be erected in China, and fifty thousand of them will be skyscrapers – the equivalent to ten New Yorks. It is similarly hard to take in fully the terrible environmental price that is being paid for this, which began to become visible to the outside world about a decade ago (a key moment being in 2007, when China surpassed the US in carbon dioxide emissions and thus became officially the world’s biggest polluter). It is now increasingly documented, though, and you can pick out jaw-dropping figures at will: in 2006 the heavily industrialised provinces of Guangdong and Fujian discharged nearly 8.3 billion tonnes of sewage into the ocean, without treatment, a 60 per cent increase from 2001; by 2020 the volume of urban rubbish in China is expected to reach 400 million tonnes, equivalent to the figure for the entire world in 1997; and so on. But perhaps a single example should stand for all, that of the baiji, the legendary freshwater dolphin, a true wildlife treasure, ‘the goddess of the Yangtze’: by 2006, so gross and extreme had the industrialisation and pollution of the great river become that the baiji had been driven to extinction.
A major concern, however, is not only what China’s frenzied growth is doing to its own environment, but what it is also doing to environments beyond its borders. The country is now not only the world’s biggest importer of timber, it is also the biggest importer of illegally logged timber, and thus ‘exporting deforestation’; its insatiable demand for wood is the major driver of rainforest destruction around the world. Its demand for ivory, especially since it was allowed to take part in the internationalivory auction of 2008, is behind the renewed upsurge in the slaughter of African elephants; its demand for pangolins, or scaly anteaters, prized both for their meat and their scales, used in traditional Chinese medicine, has meant that all eight pangolin species are now threatened with extinction; its demand for tiger bones for medicinal use is similarly threatening the world’s surviving wild tigers, while its demand for shark fins is behind the booming and unsustainable slaughter of the world’s sharks (one estimate is that 73 million are killed annually for shark fin soup, increasingly served or ordered as a wealth-displaying dish by the burgeoning Chinese middle class). But the most far-reaching effect yet beyond its borders may be in what it is doing to the Yellow Sea, the vital flyway stopping place for the migrant shorebirds of twenty-two countries.
For China’s wholly unchallengeable growth imperative, and the fact that six hundred million of its people, nearly a tenth of the world’s population, live in river catchments which drain into the Yellow Sea, mean that the pressure to reclaim the tidal flats along its coastline is irresistible, and it is proceeding with ever-increasing rapidity. You can argue that such reclamation has always been done, but as a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2012 makes clear, it is the speed and the scale at which it is being done now which is the problem. Since 1980 China has reclaimed no less than 51 per cent of all its coastal wetlands (this includes habitats such as mangroves and sea grass beds), and South Korea, 60 per cent (of a lower base). Of the key areas of tidal mudflats on which the shorebirds of the flyway depend, around the Yellow Sea as a whole, 35 per cent has already gone, and the remainder will go soon. It is likely that every major Yellow Sea tidal flat now has a development plan attached to it.
The situation, barely noticed by the world at large, is regarded by environmentalists involved as a wildlife catastrophe in the making, indeed, it is already
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