How the Philippines is destroying South China Sea's ecological environment

BEIJING, July 16 (Xinhua) -- For 25 years, a Philippine vessel built during World War II that was intentionally run aground at Ren'ai Jiao in the South China Sea has been damaging the corals along the way and polluting the marine environment.

That's just one example of the Philippines' environmental destruction in the South China Sea; other examples have included poisoning fish with sodium cyanide, blast fishing and unleashing marine waste.

A CORAL REEF CANCER

In 1999, the Philippine warship Sierra Madre rushed to the lagoon slope on the northwest side of Ren'ai Jiao, a once beautiful coral reef, and has illegally sat atop it until now.

During the grounding process, the vessel fiercely crashed, cut and scrapped the coral reef flat, causing severe damage to the corals and benthic organisms within the vessel's path, according to a Survey Report on the Damage to Coral Reef Ecosystem by Illegally Grounded Military Vessel at Ren'ai Jiao, released on July 8 by the South China Sea Ecological Center and the South China Sea Development Research Institute of China's Ministry of Natural Resources.

The old warship has long been rusty and dilapidated, but the Philippine side has insisted on sending personnel to it.

"Rust, paint, the discharge of waste oil and wastewater by the ship's personnel, the incineration and disposal of garbage, etc., continue to damage the ecological environment of Ren'ai Jiao," said Hu Guolin, director of China's Sansha Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment.

The report showed that from 2011 to 2024, the aggregate coverage of reef-building corals at the Ren'ai Jiao reef flat declined by approximately 38.2 percent. The rate of decline in the reef flat surrounding the vessel within a radius of 400 meters reached an astonishing 87.3 percent.

The concentrations of heavy metals, dissolved inorganic phosphorus and oils were significantly higher than previously recorded, said the report.

"The Philippines' illegally grounded military vessel is an environmental cancer here," said Hu.

Yang Xiao, deputy director of the Institute of Maritime Strategy Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, agreed. "The grounded warship is 80 years old, fixed in one place for 25 years, and there have been people on board to generate garbage, which is a typical case that contains almost all elements of similar ship contamination around the world, and it's indeed a severe cancer," he said.

DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIORS

The Coral Triangle, a global hotspot of marine bio-diversity in the western Pacific region, encompassing the waters of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines, among others, is suffering from the actions of the Philippines.

Yang said that as an archipelagic country located at the critical position of the "Coral Triangle," the Philippines' actions are crucial to marine ecology.

However, some Filipino fishermen are not safeguarding this crucial environmental asset. Instead, they use cyanide, including sodium cyanide, a highly poisonous compound, to poison fish, causing severe damage to the marine ecological environment.

The Manila Bulletin, a Philippine news outlet, reported last year that "using cyanide in catching fish is not a Filipino discovery but an American ingenuity. A certain Bridges first used sodium cyanide to stun and capture tropical fish in 1958 in Illinois. And it happened that a Filipino aquarium fish collector learned about it."

Since the beginning of its use, over a million kilograms of toxic sodium cyanide have been deployed, Albaris Tahiluddin and Jurmin Sarri, both from the Tawi-Tawi College of Technology and Oceanography of Mindanao State University, said in their paper published by a Turkish journal in 2022.

The paper, titled "An Overview of Destructive Fishing in the Philippines," said that spraying sodium cyanide solution into the sea areas where fish hide can make fish faint and fishing easier. By this method, nearly 50 percent of the exposed fish die from acute poisoning, while only 10 percent of the exposed fish are selected by fish collectors for aquariums.

Coral has also fallen victim to cyanide fishing by Filipino fishermen. As some targeted fish tend to hide in coral, the latter is inevitably sprayed with large amounts of cyanide.

Cyanide fishing "harms both target- and non-target species," and "it triggers coral bleaching by disrupting the zooxanthellae that provide nutrients to the coral," Mageswari Sangaralingam, honorary secretary of Friends of the Earth Malaysia, told Xinhua. "The physical structure of the reef will remain intact, but in fact, the coral polyps have been killed."

Blast fishing is also highly destructive. The Philippine News Agency reported in 2022 that a Filipino fisherman was killed and two others were injured while engaging in dynamite fishing in the seawater of Samar in the eastern Philippines.

"Nowhere else in the world are coral reefs abused as much as the reefs in the Philippines," Reef Check, a public service organization, quoted marine scientist Don McAllister as saying.