from the Inquirer:
According to the report “Deep Blue Scars: Environmental Threats to the South China Sea,” (according to a report from the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) of Center for Strategic and International Studies )increased fishing, dredging, land fill and giant clam harvesting have taken a “devastating toll,” especially on the biodiversity’s main foundation—coral reefs.
yup. they blame every country, but ignore the real cause: China is doing this, and they don't care.
Indeed, China's overfishing is harming a lot of other countries too.
NYTimes report 2022 about Chinese overfishing (behind paywall)..
With its own Coastal Waters depleted, China has builta global fishing operation unmatched by any other country...
Chinese fishing in ⬤ 2020 and ⬤ 2021. The Galápagos are part of Ecuador. And yet each year growing numbers of Chinese commercial ships, thousands of miles from home, fish here, at times right on the edge of Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone
The Chinese ships since 2016 have operated off South America virtually all day, all year, moving with the seasons from the coasts of Ecuador to Peru … and eventually to Argentina, where they have fished for what amounts collectively to more than 16,000 days already this year.
The scale has raised alarms about the harm to the local economies and the environment, as well as the commercial sustainability of tuna, squid and other species....
Over the last two decades, China has built the world’s largest deep-water fishing fleet, by far, with nearly 3,000 ships. Having severely depleted stocks in its own coastal waters,
italics mine
China now fishes in any ocean in the world, and on a scale that dwarfs some countries’ entire fleets near their own waters. The impact is increasingly being felt from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific, from the coasts of Africa to those off South America — a manifestation on the high seas of China’s global economic might.
and on top of this, the Chinese are attacking Phil Coast Guard ships off our coast.
