“There are 2,000 Spoon-billed Sandpipers in the world – they are really rare. Our team saw 200 of these birds here [Saemangeum] last year. That’s ten percent of all the world’s spoonbills. If they destroy this place by finishing the construction of the sea wall, it will cause their extinction.”

—Ki Seop Lee,
Korean ornithologist,
quoted by Robert Lamb in Earth Report,
30 May 2003

Save Saemangeum Wetlands / South Korea - Archived

One of the most dramatic social movements for environmental protection in our time is being waged in the Republic of Korea, and the threatened ecosystem is a vast expanse of mud.

The Saemangeum tidal flats formed over millennia as the Mankyung and Dongjin rivers deposited silt at the shore of the Yellow Sea. Teaming with fish, shellfish and invertebrates, the mudflats support some 25,000 small–scale fishermen and their families.

Saemangeum also provides the most important feeding ground for hundreds of thousands of shorebirds that migrate between Australia and the Arctic. Famished and exhausted from flights of several thousand miles, shorebirds rest and feed at Saemangeum for weeks at a time, preparing to resume their 9,000-mile journeys. Among the globally endangered visitors at Saemangeum are the Spotted Greenshank (estimated world population 700) and Spoon-billed Sandpiper (estimated world population 2,000). The Ramsar Convention defines as “wetlands of international importance” those used regularly by 20,000 shorebirds. Saemangeum is used by over 500,000 shorebirds per year. Thirty species of waterbird are supported in internationally important concentrations at Saemangeum – more than any other site in Korea.

In 1991, the Korean government began building a 33–kilometer sea wall to cut the flow of seawater across the Saemangeum mudflats and “reclaim” them for agricultural use. Against the advice of the government’s own 2001 Expert Review Panel, and in spite of a decade of public demonstrations, South Korea’s newly elected president is allowing continued construction of the sea wall, now 75% complete. If completed as scheduled in 2005, the sea wall would be the world’s longest. It would destroy a 208–square–kilometer ecosystem that is Korea’s most important wetland. The Yellow Sea fishery would lose a major spawning ground, and ornithologists believe that a tenth of the visiting bird populations would perish for lack of sustenance.

This year, with opinion polls running 81% against the reclamation project, Buddhist and Christian religious leaders galvanized public protest by undertaking a 65–day march from Saemangeum to Seoul, a distance of 310 kilometers (194 miles). They took three steps, then kneeled and bowed to the ground continuously for the entire march, a form of protest called Samboilbae (see www.greenkorea.org/zb/view.php?id=new&no=9). Some of South Korea’s best known celebrities joined in the “Three Steps One Bow” march, arriving at Seoul’s city hall on May 31 along with some 8,000 people. For a week in June, civic groups attempted to prevent the closing of the dike by digging dirt out one shovel–full at a time.

More information about this issue.

Make a donation for this campaign.

Write a letter for this campaign.

Campaign partner(s) and credits.