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Abstract
The situation in the South China Sea (SCS) is the epitome of a wicked problem where issues cross state boundaries and domains, and where stakeholders range from fishers to governments to shipping industries. This article frames the SCS as a social-ecological system that is composed of biological and social subsystems. It explains how, for over 70 years, global political and economic structures have conditioned state responses – territorialisation, militarisation, extraction, and exploitation – that, in turn, have led to cascading risks for further environmental degradation and conflict at different levels of community. This article uses the grammar of riskification, rather than securitisation, because the crisis in the SCS requires governance rather than military action. Any code of conduct needs to emphasise stewardship rather than ownership and to be climate-centred rather than threat-centred, in order to address the very real risk of the collapsing biological subsystem upon which the social subsystem ultimately depends.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the participants of the RSIS Roundtable ‘Climate Security in the Indo-Pacific: Strategic Implications for Defense and Foreign Affairs’ (2 November 2022) for their comments, and Cameron Olson for his research assistance on this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 It is estimated that fish catch from IUUF was between 11 and 26 million tonnes per year, ‘for an estimated value of US$10–23 billion’, in the years leading up to 2014 (FAO Citation2016, 15–16).
2 These include the US-based Center for Climate and Security, the Center for Naval Analyses’ (CNA) Military Advisory Board, the German-based Adelphi, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Dutch government-funded Planetary Security Initiative, the International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS) and the Climate Security Expert Network.
3 B.L. Cherkasskii, “The System of the Epidemic Process,” Journal of Hygiene Epidemiology Microbiology and Immunology 32, 3 (1988): 321, quoted in (Colding and Barthel Citation2019, 1). The term ‘social-ecological system’ was introduced in the 1970s but has become relevant because of the environmental damage wrought by human interaction and consumption (see Refulio-Coronado et al. Citation2021; Colding and Barthel Citation2019).
4 According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), LMEs ‘are regions of the world’s oceans, encompassing coastal areas from river basins and estuaries to the seaward boundaries of continental shelves and the outer margins of the major ocean current systems’. The world’s 66 LMEs ‘produced about 80% of global annual marine fishery biomass … [and] contribute USD 12.6 trillion in goods and services each year to the global economy’.
5 Data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); see https://www.lmehub.net/#south-china-sea.
6 The World Economic Forum considers 1945–1989 as ‘Globalisation 2.0’ when multinational companies exported their factories, and when world exports comprised between 5 and 15% of the world gross domestic product (GDP; Vanham Citation2019). Other scholars label this period as the ‘great acceleration, when petroleum-powered globalization became the key driver in the transformation of the biosphere’ (Dalby Citation2014, 4).
7 Viet Nam occupied 16 features, China had six, Malaysia had three, and the Philippines and Taiwan each occupied one feature.
8 Indonesia’s and Malaysia’s combined total oil production was around 1500 to 2000 Mbl/day during this period, but this number includes Indonesian oil blocks located outside of the South China Sea.
9 The Maritime Assertiveness Project is composed of a panel of international experts, and is supported by the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. It looked at four types of assertiveness moves: declarative, demonstrative, coercive, and use of force. It also studied the issue areas involved, namely energy, fisheries, administrative control, military-security, and political support. The report by Chubb (Citation2022) studied only China, Viet Nam and the Philippines’ actions from 1970 to 2015.
10 Concerns about the warming effect of greenhouse gasses were made public by the 1987 Brundtland Report, and in a 1988 US Congressional testimony by NASA scientist James E. Hansen (Conway Citation2008).
11 WEF considers 1989–2008 as Globalisation 3.0, when trade accounted for half of the world’s GDP (Vanham Citation2019).
12 By 2011, oil production from the South China Sea was estimated at 1.3 billion barrels/day and natural gas production was 3400 billion cu.ft.
13 According to Greer (Citation2016), coral coverage rates in disputed areas of the SCS ‘have declined from over 60 percent to just 20 percent’ since the 1990s, and that ‘virtually all SCS fishery stocks are collapsed (roughly 25 percent), over-exploited (roughly 25 percent), or fully-exploited (roughly 50 percent)’. Between 1960 and 2000, highly popular species such as tuna, mackerel jacks, and sharks had been reduced by 50% (McManus et al. Citation2016).
14 According to the Burke et al. (Citation2012), littoral countries of the SCS have high to very high social and economic vulnerability to reef loss.
15 Another source stated that between 2010 and 2016, Chinese maritime law enforcement vessels were involved in 79% of the 70 major incidents that occurred in the SCS (China Power Team Citation2016).
16 The term usually refers to distributional questions over a country’s resources; but it is used here as ‘a geopolitical discourse about sovereignty, the state, and territory, as well as the rights and privileges of citizenship, national identity, and the values a group assigns to resources’ (Koch and Perreault Citation2019, 612).
17 The FAO (Citation2014) estimates that between 1994 and 2014, IUUF catch went from 11 to 26 million tonnes with values reaching between $10 to $23 billion (FAO Citation2014).
18 This ranking is based on an Integrated Local Threat Index which includes ‘threats from local activities of overfishing and destructive fishing, coastal development, watershed-based pollution, and marine-based pollution and damage’. See https://iuufishingindex.net/ranking.
19 The researchers used Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR).
20 China is not the only ‘guilty’ party. The so-called blue boats of Viet Nam are criticised as criminal actors, and there are reports that Philippine law enforcement officials had disguised themselves as fishers in order to deter IUUF. It is also reported that some Philippine government agencies were enlisting some fishers to become a militia force, but Filipino fishermen from Subic and Zambales ‘have not been very supportive of the idea’ (Zhang and Bateman Citation2017, 292).
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Maria Ortuoste
Maria Ortuoste is currently Professor of Political Science at California State University East Bay. Her major research interests are regional maritime security, ASEAN and ARF, the South China Sea, and the domestic politics of Southeast Asian countries. She is currently working on a book manuscript about Maritime Space, Security, and the Building of States in Southeast Asia.