Abstract
This paper assessed environmental impacts of marine sand mining on coastal areas and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of Korea, and diagnosed problems of the related assessment statements for suggesting key assessment items (scoping) and system improvement. To mitigate conflicts and environmental impacts caused by large-scale, concentrated sand mining, we suggest it is critical to promote sustainable and eco-friendly utilization of marine resources while listening opinions from various stakeholders and analyzing alternative plans. Especially, it should be mandatory as a scoping item to provide verifiable data on the amount of sand, potential and accumulative impacts by mining, and key assessment items (e.g. erosion and sedimentation by submarine topography, benthic change, spreading of suspended solids, water pollution, grain-size change, and impact on fisheries resources). We also suggest that postassessment and monitoring should be improved to enable tracking of environmental impacts caused by sand mining through seasonal monitoring together with intermittent short-term surveys. In addition, effective measures to mitigate the impacts is also essential. As repeated sand mining at large-scale can damage marine ecosystems by long-term accumulated impacts, we suggest that assessment systems and regulatory policies should be developed and established, especially for ensuring reliability of assessment and review on selected major sandmining projects.
