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As a morning mist rolls in from the Arabian Sea, young men lead a cou- ple of dozen ox-drawn carts onto a beach south of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital. Using shovels and buckets, they pile their rickety
wooden transports high with sand, which
they will sell to cementmakers. Altering the
shoreline is illegal in India, but enforcement of coastal protection zones is lax, says
Sumaira Abdulali, a local environmentalist
who was beaten up after confronting “sand
miners” near here.
Across Asia, rampant extraction of sand
for construction is eroding coastlines and
scouring waterways. “For a resource we
think is infinite, we are beginning to realize that it’s not,” says Aurora Torres, an
ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig.
“It’s a global concern, but especially acute
in Asia, where all trends show that urbanization and the region’s big construction
boom are going to continue for many years.”
And it is taking an environmental toll that
scientists are beginning to assess—and
environmentalists hope to reduce.
Already, scientists have linked poorly
regulated and often illegal sand removal
to declines in seagrasses in Indonesia and
in charismatic species such as the Ganges
River dolphin and terrapins in India and
Malaysia. In eastern China’s Poyang Lake,
dredging boats are sucking up tens of mil-
lions of tons of sand a year, altering the
hydrology of the country’s largest fresh-
water lake, a way station for migratory
birds. Conservation groups are urging gov-
ernments to crack down. But the political
clout of developers means it will be an
uphill—and perilous—battle. Last Septem-
ber, for example, two activists with Mother
Nature Cambodia who were filming illegal
sand dredging off the Cambodian coast
were arrested and convicted of “violation of
privacy.” They spent several months in jail
before being released last month.
Used to make concrete and glass, sand
is an essential ingredient of nearly every
modern highway, airport, dam, windowpane, and solar panel. Although desert
sand is plentiful, its wind-tumbled particles
are too smooth—and therefore not cohesive enough—for construction material.
Instead, builders prize sand from quar-
ries, coastlines, and riverbeds. “The very
best sand for construction is river sand;
it’s the right particle size and shape,” says
David Shankman, professor emeritus of
geography at the University of Alabama in
Tuscaloosa, who studies the hydrology of
Poyang Lake, a repository of sand deposited
by Yangtze River tributaries.
Between 1994 and 2012, global cement
production—a proxy for concrete use—
tripled, from 1.37 billion to 3.7 billion tons,
driven largely by Asian construction, according to a 2014 report from the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Land reclamation projects, too, have a ra-
pacious hunger for sand. Singapore, for ex-
ample, has expanded its land area by 22%
using sand primarily from Malaysia, Cam-
bodia, and Indonesia as fill. All told, UNEP
warned, sand mining—on an industrial
scale and by individual operators—“greatly
exceeds natural renewal rates” and “is in-
creasing exponentially.”
Scientists are now tracing the collateral
damage. In a paper under review at Sci-
ence of the Total Environment, Richard
Unsworth, an ecologist at Swansea Univer-
sity in the United Kingdom, and colleagues
explain how sand mining has driven de-
clines of seagrass meadows off of Indonesia.
Sediment plumes stirred up by the dredging
block sunlight, impeding photosynthesis,
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
IN DEPTH
By Christina Larson, in Kihim, India
Asia’s hunger for sand takes toll on ecology
Scientists link species’ declines to the mining of construction-grade sand
“For a resource we think
is infinite, we are beginning
to realize that it’s not.”
Aurora Torres, German Centre for
Integrative Biodiversity Research
