South China Sea: An environmental tragedy of the commons
South China Sea:
an environmental tragedy of the commons
WRITTEN BY SABRINA MOLES
7 December 2022
After being brought before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) by the Philippine government in 2012, China was held accountable for violating six rules of the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea in July 2016. China’s claims have not changed much since then: Beijing is still alleging its sovereignty and maritime rights over a vast area that overrides any convention. Little evidence has been provided beyond historical claims based on the 1949 Map of Chinese Islands in the South China Sea (SCS) featuring the infamous nine-dash line highlighting the area under Beijing’s jurisdiction.
The 479-page ruling on the Beijing-Manila territorial dispute contains another element that is seldom discussed: environmental degradation. According to the PCA, China caused “severe harm on the marine environment” while pursuing its commercial and military activities in the SCS. In 2022, this issue is no longer a marginal factor in such a complex situation, where territorial disputes, fish scarcity, and increasing energy demands overlap.
Scientists agree that sharing natural resources will be increasingly difficult in the future due to climate change and pollution. According to the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Without transformation, global inequities will likely increase between regions [...] and conflicts between jurisdictions may emerge and escalate”. Different economic interests collide in the SCS, resulting in overlapping intense fishing, and patrolling activities, as well as the construction of islands, to assert their territorial claims and resource rights. Conflicts are likely to intensify in such a fraught scenario.
The dangerous appeal and consequences of illegal fishing
Covering an area of approximately 3.5 million square kilometres, the SCS is an essential part of the economy of ten countries (Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam). More than USD 5 trillion of goods move across this region, while the fishing industry in the East and SCS has been estimated to be worth around USD 100 billion.
Tensions in the South China Sea are creating a dangerous, competitive pattern in the relations among the countries involved. Sovereignty claims, together with the urgent demand for food, energy resources, and profits are all defining a set of priorities that is increasingly disregarding environmental damage.
Illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing is widespread in this area, a trend that could increase due to economic competition and increasingly impoverished maritime life. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), 26 million tonnes of fish are caught illegally every year, with eight Asian countries featuring in the top 20 of the IUU fishing index.
Unseen fishing activities in the SCS are on the rise, intertwined with military activities, maritime claims, and fish scarcity. More than 50 per cent of fishing vessels in the world are operating in the SCS — a number that is increasing, while fish stocks are diminishing dramatically. Total fish stocks have been depleted by 70-95 per cent since the 1950s, while catch rates have dropped by 66-75 per cent in the last 20 years.
Fishing vessels try to take advantage of every inch of the 200 nautical mile national exclusive economic zone (EEZ). However, the overlapping EEZ claims of neighbouring countries in the SCS are leading to competition and even conflict. Vietnamese fishing vessels, for instance, have been attacked many times by Chinese ships. In some cases, the aggression ended with the destruction of the vessel itself, as in April 2020, when a Chinese boat crashed and sunk a Vietnamese vessel with eight fishermen on board.
This winner-takes-all race also means that sometimes companies resort to illegal tools to increase their catch rate. Maritime NGOs report that many fishing vessels use dynamite, a widespread but extremely harmful fishing technique that is still widely accepted in many SCS countries. Other extremely polluting techniques include the use of cyanide, which destroys the environment and has long-term consequences for marine life. A research team led by Dr Wilfredo Y. Licuanan, a marine biologist at De La Salle University, in the Philippines estimates that it takes more than 38 years with no human interference to obtain a 50 per cent recovery of coral reefs.
However, it is difficult — if not impossible — to track all these activities. According to the law, every vessel should implement an Automatic Identification System (AIS), a security device that discloses the exact position of the boat, together with its name, nationality, and size. But few vessels comply with this requirement. For example, as Milko Mariano Schvartzman of Oceanosanos observes, “In the Galapagos, we have seen that only half of the ships had their AIS turned on. The tracking problem is not a trivial matter: without AIS we have to resort to satellites, which are not precise enough to give us concrete evidence on the state of fishing activities in a given area".
The struggle for resources and land
Maritime energy nationalism is deeply intertwined with sovereignty claims. According to the US Energy Information Agency, the SCS holds about 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — a desirable source of energy for growing Asian economies. The energy demand in Southeast Asia has increased by 80 per cent in the last twenty years, and the whole region is likely to drive global oil demand by 2023.
While Southeast Asian countries struggle with burgeoning energy demand, China is nonetheless looking for new energy resources to sustain its economy. As the Center for Naval Analyses states in a report on China-Vietnam tensions in the SCS, “China has additionally used its navy and civilian maritime law enforcement agencies to directly interfere with Vietnamese and Filipino resource exploration and exploitation activities within their respective claimed EEZs in the SCS”. Malaysian ships have been intimidated as well. In a confrontation in 2019, for example, two offshore supply vessels were encircled by some Chinese ships.
Marine traffic in the region has significant consequences for the environment. The SCS is a hotspot for biodiversity, with 600 species of coral reef, 3,000 species of fish, and 1,500 species of sponge. Even beyond naval traffic, more human activities take place at sea, the greater the impact on the surrounding ecosystem. This also extends to oil and gas drilling: offshore oil rigs increase the chances of contamination due to negligence or external causes, while explorations have multiple side effects. “Seismic techniques used to explore for oil under the ocean floor”, states an analysis published by the US Energy Information Administration, “may harm fish and marine mammals”. However, “technologies that significantly increase the efficiency of exploration and drilling activities also reduce effects on the environment”. But the fact that the actors involved would use high-end, environmentally sustainable technologies cannot be taken for granted.
Finally, turning sandbanks into territories has also become the norm in how China pushes its maritime claims in the SCS. Since 2013, the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative has tracked at least 1,200 hectares of new land built by Chinese companies around the emerging features of the Paracel Islands, Spratly Islands, and the Scarborough Shoal. Deep-water dredging disturbs the environment, changing wave patterns, and wiping out the microorganisms essential for coral reefs and animal life. Construction activities on these territories also inevitably result in more pollution, with debris and rubbish discarded into the sea or simply burned.
Accountability and dialogue
Tensions in the SCS are creating a dangerous, competitive pattern in the relations among the countries involved. Sovereignty claims, together with the urgent demand for food, energy resources, and profits are all defining a set of priorities that are increasingly disregarding environmental damage.
Climate and environmental diplomacy can offer some solutions to the overlapping political and ecological problems of the SCS may be found through. For instance, one of the most recent significant events bringing together experts and officials from all over the world, the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon in June this year, tried to make countries accountable for their maritime activities, with participants registering about 700 voluntary commitments. Among them, China promised to launch 31 maritime ecological and preservation projects. In the meantime, the World Trade Organization reached a historic agreement on curbing financial support for harmful overfishing activities. However, asking countries for significant commitments is not easy. After years of negotiations, the UN is still trying to engage all nations in drafting a treaty for biodiversity conservation with little result.
Another solution, as journalist and author James Borton suggests, is pushing for further science diplomacy. This kind of cooperation “helps promote confidence building among the parties, directly and indirectly, involved in the SCS dispute” because “environmental monitoring successfully offers a context for countries to express their true perception of the region without being affected by nationalistic, political, or economic factors like sovereignty or foreign policy objectives”. In other words, a call to save the environment can trigger cooperation, since it is a non-traditional security issue that is in the common interest of every related country. The climate crisis is no longer an invisible menace, but a present threat to human life and, consequently, the economy and politics. The SCS exhibits a “tragedy of the commons”, where individual interests clash with increasingly scarce shared resources. The main question now is whether governments will be willing to step back on narrowly defined national interests in support of the needs of the many?
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Sabrina Moles is author and editor for China Files. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature and has graduated from her master’s degree in International Relations and Asia Area Studies with a dissertation on the global impact of Chinese energy policies. Her main research interests encompass energy transition, climate change and environmental issues in Asia. Image credit: Wikimedia.