Japan Scraps Airport Plan In Bow to Conservationists

In an attempt to boost Japan’s image in environmental matters, government officials announced Wednesday that they will scrap plans to build a landfill airport near a rare stand of blue coral off a remote island in Okinawa prefecture.

Junji Nishime, the governor of Okinawa, told a news conference that the prefectural, or state, government was responding to international criticism and vociferous local protest in deciding to move the airport project to a new site about two miles north of the original site.

Environmentalists had waged a campaign to stop construction at the village of Shiraho on Ishigaki Island, saying it would harm one of the few coral reefs that has escaped destruction related to development in the Ryukyu Islands. Soil erosion has brought on a crown-of-thorns starfish infestation that has killed about 90% of the coral in Okinawa prefecture, marine biologists say.

It was not clear whether the revised construction plan will pose any danger to the Shiraho reef, or whether the airport will encounter renewed opposition by residents near the new site.

Nishime, who had maintained that there was no other suitable location for the runway on Ishigaki Island, made his decision after the central government’s environmental agency came out against the plan. There had been 13 years of heated controversy.

Masahisa Aoki, director general of the agency, told reporters that Japan is now adopting a “leadership role in protecting the global environment.” The government plans an international conference on environmental issues in September.

“It is my conviction that we must protect the coral in Okinawa,” Aoki said.

The Shiraho decision is believed to be the first time the agency has asserted itself to halt a major development project because of potential environmental impact, according to Cecilia Jung-Sook Song of Traffic (Japan), an environmental protection group associated with the World Wildlife Fund.

“This is a historic development as far as Japan’s environmental policy goes,” Song said. “Certainly it would have been quite embarrassing if Okinawa had gone ahead and dumped on Shiraho.”

In addition to the World Wildlife Fund, the Cousteau Society and the International Union for Conservation of Nature have studied the reef and condemned the $240-million project.

Prefectural officials have argued that a new airport is necessary to accommodate jumbo jets bringing tourists on direct flights from the main Japanese islands. They asserted in a series of environmental assessments, disputed by opponents as lacking scientific credibility, that a 6,600-foot runway could be built on part of the reef without causing significant harm to a nearby colony of blue coral.