An indicator framework to evaluate the Blue Bay Remediation Project in China

The State Oceanic Administration (SOA) of China announced the start of a nation-wide coastal remediation project at the National Maritime Work Conference in 2016. This project is called the Blue Bay Remediation Project (BBPP), with aims and goals that all coastal provinces and municipalities need to follow. This Project can be regarded as the first comprehensive coastal remediation project in China, although some provinces have undertaken several trials to remediate the coastal environment over the past decade. Each year, the national plan is revised and updated; we analyze the evolution of the plan and detail the different versions. As this project is extremely costly, there has been an increasing call from the public to evaluate its processes and outcomes. Here, we develop an assessment framework based on ISO 14031 with 246 indicators to evaluate the Project, and explain some of the indicators. The Indicator framework contains 6 categories (General, Planning, Operation, Checking, Environmental impact, and Management), and a full list of the indicators is given in the Appendix The BBRP in Yantai city is chosen to implement the evaluation framework as an example to verify the effectiveness. The evaluation result shows that the BBRP in Yantai scores 17 (the full score is 25), which means the completion degree of BBRP in Yantai is 68%. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.