Haiyang Kaifa yu guanli (Jul 2022)

Research on Ecological Protection and Restoration Strategy of Reclamation Projects in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area

  • Mianrun CHEN,
  • Jinhua WANG,
  • Liuli ZHANG,
  • Qingyang SUN,
  • Shengpeng ZHANG

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 39, no. 7
pp. 3 – 13

Abstract

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Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is an important space carrier for China to build a world-class city group and to participate in global competition. Since the 1980s, large-scale reclamation and cultivation activities have been carried out in order to accelerate the urbanization construction. Consequently, large area of natural shoreline, beach and muddy beach and other important coastal wetlands disappeared. Mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds and other important typical coastal wetland ecosystems have also been greatly damaged, and some specific areas even harder to play their normal ecological functions due to the serious damage of reclamation projects. In order to strictly control the reclamation projects, China has issued a series of relevant policies since 2016, which require to speed up the handling of the historical problems of reclamation projects and to gradually restore the degraded coastal wetlands by means of ecological protection and restoration strategies based on the concept of "natural restoration as the main and artificial restoration as the auxiliary". Based on several actual design cases in GBA, this paper discussed the ecological protection and restoration measures from three different perspectives of management, science and technology, aiming at the loss of coastline, degradation of coastal wetland function, damage of hydrodynamics and loss of biological resources caused by reclamation project. This paper can provide a reference for the overall planning and marine ecosystem management in GBA.

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