GEO-6 Regional Assessment for Asia and the Pacific


Table 2.5.2: Asia and the Pacific: change in coastal populations within 100 kilmetres of the coast, 2000-2025


Country Australia


Bangladesh Cambodia China Fiji


India


Indonesia Japan


Korea, DPR Korea, R Malaysia Myanmar


New Zealand Pakistan


Papua New Guinea


Philippines Singapore


Solomon Islands Sri Lanka Thailand Viet Nam


Source: Schwartz 2005


already been adversely affected. The degradation of coastal ecosystems has been exacerbated by decreasing ecological resilience and by climate change (APEC 2014).


Population change,


2000–2025 within 100 km from coast, (‘000 people)


4 574


28 315 1 376


48 991 322


85 062 60 110 -4 892 5 642 5 650 9 092 8 967 1 118


10 274 1 674


30 157 1 325 400


5 113 3 326


24 474


27 40 52 16 38 32 29 -4


26 12 42 37 30 72 57


40 37


90 27 14 37


Increase (%)


Most of Asia’s tropical and temperate coastal ecosystems are already under such severe pressure that the added impacts of climate change are hard to detect. For coastal areas, sea-level rise will be the key factor, particularly if combined with changes in cyclone frequency or intensity, or, in Arctic Asia, with a lengthening if the open-water season (Hijioka et al. 2014).


Pollution and marine litter


Oxygen-minimum zones (OMZs) are naturally present in many habitats, including marine sediments, but are expanding due to anthropogenic influences. Future warming will accelerate the spread of hypoxic zones, especially in temperate to sub-polar regions (Pörtner et al. 2014).


In Asia, rapid economic and population growth in the coastal areas, combined with increasing industrial production, consumption and trade of food and energy, have placed huge environmental pressures on coastal ecosystems. Of these effects, the intensification of hypoxia has been the most fundamental in estuarine and coastal marine systems. Until recently, hypoxic areas were located mainly in developed countries, but the largest future increases in the number of hypoxic areas are expected in southern and eastern Asia (STAP 2011).


Commensurate with mass production in the 1940s, plastic waste started to accumulate in the oceans, some dumped from ships. International agreements banning waste disposal at sea only came into force half a century later in 1988. A category of plastic waste, termed microplastics, is of increasing concern (GESAMP 2015). Most of the waste found in the oceans, whether it is washed up on the shores or spiralling in gyres, comes from land-based sources (Figure 2.5.5). On the basis of the estimated mass of plastic waste generated in 2010 by populations living within 50 kilometres of the coast, the top five land-based sources of ocean’s plastic waste in Asia were, in order,: China, Indonesia, Viet Nam, the Philippines and Sri Lanka (Jambeck et al. 2015).


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