States jostling for territorial dominance in the South China Sea have inflicted untold damage on the marine environment, according to a new investigation by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) and China Ocean Institute, both based in the U.S. The findings, presented in a recent report, are the “most complete picture to date” of the devastation wreaked by industrial overfishing, rampant island-building and reckless giant clam harvesting by bordering states, the authors say. The low-lying but resource-rich features of the South China Sea have been fiercely contested among bordering states for decades. The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan, Vietnam and China vie for control of the islets and reefs, some of which only breach the ocean surface at extreme low tide. But amid the struggle, the marine environment is being ravaged. The scale of the damage inflicted by competing states on the region’s coral reefs, which represent the foundations of the South China Sea’s marine food webs, can’t be overstated, according to report co-author Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia program at the AMTI. “It’s the largest active man-made reef destruction in human history,” Poling said at a press briefing in Bangkok on Feb. 20. The AMTI is part of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded in part by the governments of the U.S. and Taiwan; the latter is among the claimants to a disputed part of the South China Sea. The CSIS has also long advocated for a stronger U.S. military presence…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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