China Environment News

July 2, 2026

National initiatives are restoring China’s coastal ecosystems – new research shows

An Ocean University of China study finds key parts of coastal ecology recovering instead of degrading.

Rapid coastal development and climate change drive global coastal ecosystem degradation around the world. In coastal China expanding coastal development has seen wetlands gave way to fish farms, mudflats disappeared, and natural coastal habitats shrank.

Challenges such as rising sea levels, abnormally high temperatures and increasing pollution, have led to significant environmental changes that threaten these vital ecosystems.

China’s coastal development has been subject to widespread cross-regional and multi-ecosystem marine restoration initiatives, including the Mangrove Protection and Restoration Action Plan (2020-2025). However, scientists note that the effectiveness of such initiatives is often difficult to assess nationally due to the lack of scalable indicators and accessible data.

A new study by a team of researchers from the Ocean University of China, in the port city of Qingdao, found evidence that marshes were expanding, trees were reclaiming former fishponds, and parts of the coastline were recovering instead of retreating.

The researchers evaluated national coastal restoration by analyzing eight years of satellite data from more than 50 coastal cities. The restoration efforts evaluated were China’s Marine Eco-environmental Restoration Program, a state-funded push that covered 81 projects between 2016 and 2022 with over $US 7 billion funding. It covered roughly 80,940. hectares (ha) of coast, much of it formerly used for fish-farming.

The biggest change observed was the retreat of fish farms across the restored zones, with salt marshes reclaiming land that had been diked off into aquaculture ponds. The marsh area increased almost sevenfold, from about 2,671 ha to 18,130 ha.

Mangroves roughly quadrupled their footprint, climbing from around 810 to 3238 ha. Much of that new growth rose where fishponds and bare flats had been.

New mangroves replaced about 14 percent of what China lost between 1950 and 2015, and the added marshes covered close to a quarter of an earlier loss.

Mangrove ecosystems, located at the dynamic interface between land and sea in intertidal zones periodically submerged by seawater, are unique coastal ecosystems with high ecological, social and economic value. They play a critical role in supporting offshore fisheries, purifying the environment, and enhancing carbon sequestration.

The Ocean University’s major environmental analysis of eight years of satellite data coveringmore than 50 Chinese coastal cities suggests that the environmental decline that was once thought of as an inevitable consequence of development is capable of restoration and renewal with sufficient governmental and community determination.