Conservation Note
The Incheon tidal power proposal
A tidal barrage proposed on internationally important intertidal habitat near Incheon, and the assessment questions it raised.
The proposal for a tidal power plant near Incheon, on the west coast of the Republic of Korea, was one of several such schemes advanced during a national push into renewable generation, and among the most contested.
The site sits at the top of the Yellow Sea, on intertidal flats used by migratory shorebirds on the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. The objection was not to tidal generation as a technology but to building a new barrage across habitat of that importance, when the alternative of generating through sluices in existing sea walls was available and would have added little further damage.
The assessment process drew as much criticism as the scheme. Establishing what a tidal flat holds requires counts made at the right times of year, and the pace of the wider development programme left limited room for survey work of that kind, which makes an impact assessment an argument rather than a measurement.
Support for the Incheon and Ganghwa proposals weakened over the following period as the case against the siting was made. A fuller account of the argument, and of why a barrage removes intertidal habitat without building on it, is set out in the article on tidal power at Incheon and Ganghwa.
Birds Korea and BirdLife International hold the current position on Yellow Sea reclamation.