Today, the coastal areas of the world amounting to nearly 10% of the total world’s land area, supports nearly half of the world’s human population. This causes serious population pressure and environmental problems. To reduce the pressure of land scarcity, cities along the coastal land are now paying their attention to land reclamation. Although land reclamation results in significant benefits to the coastal cities, it simultaneously causes serious environmental problems. Therefore, satisfactory management of reclaimed land is a big challenge which governments are now facing. Based on economics, this article presents some economic means to efficiently manage coastal areas. Integrating the costs-benefits analysis and input-output table, this paper builds the “costs-benefits analysis system”, and provides the models of estimating the value of some main aspects of the costs. Through outcome consult method, shadow price, TCM (Travel Cost Method), CVM (Contingent Valuation Method) and other methods, one can appraise the ecological damage in monetary terms, which allows to transform questions of “yes” or “no” into questions of “more” or “less”, one can easily judge the feasibility of this project in terms of social benefits. Using this costs-benefits analysis system to assess the land reclamation in Gulei port, Zhangzhou, China, the outcome showed that the total costs were almost 3.4 times more than the benefits, meaning that it is really not beneficial to construct the project from economics point of view.
More than a decade ago the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published Legal and Institutional Aspects of Integrated Coastal Area Management in National Legislation 1. The preface to that publication pointed out that integrated coastal area management law was a relatively new the field and that few jurisdictions had comprehensive legal frameworks to promote integrated coastal management. The situation has changed dramatically since then. Integrated coastal management (ICM) is now widely accepted throughout the world as the best approach to dealing with coastal issues and the 1990s saw a proliferation of legislative reform processes throughout the world aimed at supporting the implementation of ICM. This trend remains strong and many countries, including most of the Member States of the European Union, are in the process of strengthening the legislative basis for ICM. The urgency of addressing coastal issues is now considerably greater than it was a decade ago. Despite many international environmental treaties, declarations and other promises of action, the quality of coastal environments continues to deteriorate in most of the world. Many of the major pressures on coastal areas in the early 1990s have continued to intensify. Coastal fisheries in much of the world have continued to decline rapidly while the demand for coastal resources and the pollution of coastal waters has increased in most areas due to a variety of factors including increases in coastal populations. The full implications of other threats are only now becoming apparent or being appreciated fully. These include the risk arising from the transfer of pathogens and aquatic organisms in ships' ballast water, and the effects of climate change. Sea levels are rising and in many parts of the world disruptions of weather patterns are apparent in the increased frequency and intensity of storms. As a result, coastal erosion and flooding has increased, threatening coastal human populations and the natural environment. On the positive side, it is clear that globally there is now a far greater appreciation of the environmental, economic, social, cultural and recreational importance of coastal areas, and of the value of ICM. Indeed there is now 1
Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) initiatives spread all over the world to cope with declining conditions and intensifying user conflicts to achieve sustainable development of coastal resources and environment. A set of indicators with regard to sustainable development and governance aspects were developed in Xiamen to monitor the State of Coasts (SOC) under ICM implementation. In developing the evaluation indicators for Xiamen, a number of lessons were learned related to data compilation, indicator development, public participation and scaling up. The experience of Xiamen was believed to contribute to develop evaluation indicators for ICM in China.
Several dispersing and small-scale measures such as permeable pavements, green streets, and ecological roofs for sustainable development to mitigate the heat island effect were proposed, and there the following environmental benefits and economic benefits were analyzed. Permeable pavements effectively relieve the negative influence on urban ecology caused by urban harden ground. As well, permeable pavements link up soil and air, making the ground warm in winter and cool in summer, which increase the sense of living comfort in the city. The research shows that when area of the urban roads increase to 25% of the whole city, completely applying the asphalt pavement roads can make the temperature 1 ~ 1. 5 °C lower on the whole in downtown district. Green streets are beautiful street landscapes which planting green plants such as shade trees on both sides of the streets. On one hand it can keep cool, and mitigate urban heat island effect. On the other hand it can absorb the greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, and maintain carbon-oxygen balance. Shade trees effectively prevent sunlight from hitting to the ground, and make the sun radiation intensity significantly lower than the harden ground and the lawn. The sun radiation intensity can be reduced by 80% or more on occasion that there have trees. Ecological roofs can adjust the temperature, and form natural air conditioning which is beneficial to improve the air quality. Research data show that in summer, on average, temperature of the ecological roofs are 2.6 °C lower than the bare cement roofs and in winter which are 0.84°C higher than the cement ones. Then the implementation of the feasibility through the above mentioned sustainable development measures to achieve the minimum impact on the environment, which play an important role in reducing urban surface temperature was discussed. The prospect of implementing the technology in China that usually appeared in high densely-populated urban areas was given at the end of this paper.
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