With fast economic growth, population increase, and urbanization in coastal zones, an increasing number of marine engineering projects have diminished or are diminishing the capacity of ocean and coastal ecosystems to provide goods and services for mankind, threatening the health of local populations and the sustainable development of marine economies. To prevent marine ecological damage and to ensure sustainable development in coastal regions, market-based incentives, such as marine ecological damage compensation (MEDC), have been introduced due to their high efficiency and flexibility. The basic premise of this approach is to make the responsible parties pay the full costs associated with the ocean space development activities, i.e., the ocean users should pay the private costs as well as the cost of marine ecological damage, so that excessive development activities can be curbed. While there are many studies about the ecological damage and compensation of spills of oil or other hazardous substances, coastal reclamation or wetland drainage, there have been few attempts in the academic community to research the ecological damage of marine engineering such as the construction of a sea-crossing bridge and marine culture. In practice, marine engineering gets approval from the relevant government agencies, and pays fees for the use of sea areas, which may make them ignore ecological damage compensation. However, these damages are typically long lasting and have considerable cumulative effects on marine habitats and environment. Thus, the development of a framework for ecological damage assessment caused by marine engineering is urgently needed, to ensure the marine ecosystems been compensated.
This paper presents a framework for ecological damage assessment and a model for the development of a MEDC standard. The value of ecosystem services in the affected sea area and the severity of damage to various ecosystem services in various sea area use patterns related to the marine engineering are systematically assembled in the established model. The established framework and model are employed in the Xinglin sea-crossing bridge, Xiamen. Results show that the ecological damage and therefore the ecological damage compensation of Xinglin sea-crossing bridge is 17.39 million yuan with the discount rate 2%. The amount of ecological damage is 12.76 million yuan even with a high discount rate, 4%, which is far more than the amount of compensation, 6 million yuan, which was actually imposed by local government. Xiamen municipality needs to re-examine its compensation standard to reflect the real damage of marine engineering and to ensure to collect enough money to restore the damaged ecosystems.