A Wolf in Green Clothing

For millennia, humans have been engaged in balancing molding the natural environment to make safe and habitable communities and preserving resilient, robust ecosystems that can support a variety of lifeforms. We have not always been successful—history is littered with examples of our failures—but it’s a struggle that will never end. 

Within the last several decades, in response to the serious and growing threat of climate change and increased public awareness of the necessity of biodiversity, green space, and a resilient natural environment, communities have looked to increase green and other biodiversity-supporting infrastructure.

On the surface, this would seem to be a perfect solution to this age-old balancing act. If human infrastructure can be made environmentally neutral, or even beneficial, development would become a less fraught endeavor. For Dr. Louise Firth, lecturer in marine ecology at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, that “if” is incredibly important. In May, Dr. Firth and her colleagues wrote a commentary article cautioning that “greenwashing” infrastructure could be used to facilitate coastal developments, regardless of whether the infrastructure actually promotes biodiversity.

No True Island
Firth is a marine ecologist, which she explains means she’s interested in how organisms interact with each other and their environment. “I started working in natural environments,” she says. “I was purely a rocky shore ecologist, but recently I’ve started moving into urban environments. I’ve become interested in marine life that lives in cities, in harbors, and on sea walls rather than just living in natural habitats.” 

Since 2015, Firth has been working with colleagues in Penang, Malaysia. “I started working there specifically because they are currently building artificial islands, as we speak,” she explains.

Penang is Malaysia’s second-smallest state by landmass, but it’s among those with the highest population densities and the most urbanized. The state is also home to Seberang Perai, Malaysia’s second-largest city by population. As part of the Penang South Islands Project, the Penang Government is planning to construct three islands, with a total of 4,500 acres, off the south coast of Penang. Malaysia already has two other artificial island projects—Malacca Island and Forest City Johor, the latter formerly a mangrove swamp. Now marketed as a “smart green city,” Forest City comprises four islands totaling over 3,000 acres in area and sits across the Johor Strait from Singapore.

Firth was contacted about the islands by a colleague, Dr. Su-Yin Chee, senior lecturer at Universiti Sains Malaysia and a co-author of the article. “I went out to visit and saw what was going on out there and it piqued my interest. I’d never seen an artificial island being built. Since then, I started seeing this everywhere. It’s not a new thing and it’s getting bigger—a lot bigger.”

Artificial islands are nothing new. In Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, there’s evidence that some small islets or “crannogs” are not, in fact, natural but built by Iron Age or, in some cases, Neolithic communities. In New York City, Hoffman, Swinburne, and Belmont Islands are all artificial. In Japan, in addition to more modern artificial islands, including Kansai International Airport, the only place for foreign trade and exchange during the Edo period was the small artificial island of Dejima, which has since been absorbed by nearby Nagasaki.

Where Dejima covered only 2.2 acres though, the islands Firth and her colleagues are concerned about are much larger. “I’ve been looking into artificial islands,” she says. “You name it, they’re doing it. There are a lot of really large-scale, mega-developments happening, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, and they are on a scale like I could never have imagined.”

Utopian Visions
Dubai is likely the most well-known for large and unusual artificial island projects, though many of the more abitions projects have stalled. For example, the Palm Islands are three different sets of artificial islands originally intended to be arranged in the shape of palm trees, however, only one, the Palm Jumeirah, was completed. Construction on the other two palms and plans for a series of islands called The World—intended to be shaped like a world map—stalled during the 2008 financial crash as Dubai’s building boom came to an end. 

Although lacking the whimsical style of Dubai’s islands, the Penang South Islands Project will be significantly larger, totaling 4,500 acres to the single completed palm’s 1,380. Hong Kong has also been considering a large artificial island project by reclaiming 2,500 acres of land to devote to housing as part of the Lantau Tomorrow Vision.

“Through working with artificial islands, I started to see the designs, the kind of things that architects were planning. Very often they looked utopian,” says Firth. “They look beautiful; they’ve got trees everywhere, there’s greenery everywhere. It got me thinking that perhaps with these developments, it’s the greenery that gets them through the development process. I started worrying about how we, as humans, could be abusing the greenery—the natural component—as a way of fast-tracking development.”

These concerns were what spurred Firth and her colleagues to write their article, “Greening of gray infrastructure should not be used as a Trojan horse to facilitate coastal development,” published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, and focusing on integrated green gray infrasturcture (IGGI), which aims to apply biodiversity enhancements to necessary gray infrastructure.

“We are increasingly hearing consultants, developers and local authorities discussing how implementing IGGI can expedite, facilitate, and reduce costs of regulatory processes,” write Firth and her colleagues. Without proper scrutiny, Firth worries coastal developments may get approved without knowing if proposed environmental mitigation efforts will work.

Environmental Implications
There has, at least, been increasing attention to the impact of coastal developments in the last decade. When Dubai’s Palm Islands were under construction before the 2008 financial crisis, there were serious concerns about the environmental impacts of the enormous designs, and they were not unfounded. According to a 2011 report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, environmental issues have included heavy sedimentation and long-term clouding from extended periods of construction and continued erosion, water circulation issues around the Palms’ “fronds” that could lead to anoxia or algal blooms, and damage to benthic habitat and corals, and the full environmental impact may not be known for decades. 

A smoother approval process for coastal developments that feature what Firth and her colleagues call “integrated greening of gray infrastructure” aims to avoid the environmental issues of the Palm Islands and encourage more sustainable development.

“There’s been an explosion of research recently where people like myself have been working on seawalls and coastal defense structures,” she says. “These structures have to be built; if you’re building a city, you’re going to need some hard infrastructure to protect [it]. If they need to be built, why not build them and make space for nature while you’re doing so?”

The important thing to look at, she says, is the effect on the environment. “An artificial reef could have a negative effect in that it doesn’t actually work for the purpose that it was meant [for],” she says. Doing nothing for the environment is one thing, but “it could actually have a negative effect on the natural environment,” she notes.

Unfortunately, there are a wide variety of artificial reefs that simply do not benefit corals or other reef life. In their article, Firth and her colleagues point out that developers of Palm Jumeirah in Dubai have claimed it is the world’s largest artificial reef. “We view this example as a fig leaf covering up the damage caused by the construction of the island on sedimentary and coral reef habitats,” they write.

“Whilst some proponents argue that artificial reefs are prudent recycling projects creating valuable fisheries for recreation, many artificial reefs are merely disguised ocean dumping. We view such examples as Trojan Horses which may be the result of either willful or misguided intent to dispose of material at sea,” the article continues. They argue that the full life cycle of all artificial marine structures must be taken into consideration, as “these structures will inevitably degrade, potentially losing their reef functions and causing pollution.”

Something Isn’t Always Better Than Nothing
It’s a disheartening warning—even good intentions can too easily go astray, at best doing nothing and at worst, harming the very ecosystems they’re meant to aid. What can we do to avoid wasting time and money on environmental mitigation efforts that won’t perform as promised? “The biggest consideration is why are you doing it?” says Firth. “I think a lot of people think, ‘Oh we have to try and do something.’ That’s not always the case; it completely depends on the environmental setting, the scope of the development. It really depends.” 

Considering the project and environment is important, but intention really does matter too. “Ethically, why are you doing it? Are you doing it genuinely for biodiversity, for nature’s sake? In which case, that’s fine,” says Firth. “But if you’re doing this just to fast track the development and try and get [the project] through the application process, then it’s an absolute no-no.”

It’s worth noting, she says, that research on integrated greening of gray infrastructure in the marine environment is still relatively young. “We’ve been doing a lot more in this field in terrestrial environments, but the marine environment is a much newer field. Lots of great work is going on and there are some really great examples out there, but it’s still early days for a lot of this and a lot of it has only been done once, in one place or over a short timescale,” she explains. “We’re really just lacking the evidence base for anything to be rolled out as one-size-fits-all, and I suspect one size will never fit all in this case.”

Building the Evidence
Firth and her co-authors hope their paper sparks several results. “Number one, start a conversation,” she says. “I would like to hear people’s thoughts; I would like to hear people’s experiences. Is this actually happening? Has anyone had experience speaking to a developer or a councilmember—somebody who makes decisions—have they experienced their research, or somebody else’s research, being used for this purpose?” Getting a conversation going and airing the extent of the issue is key, she says.