Island Building

This chapter reviews two papers which express concern for the impact that land reclamation, more specifically, island building has on the hydrodynamics of the local coastal areas. The first (Guo et al. in Estuar Coast Shelf Sci 206:49–60, 2018) seeks to understand the changes to the tidal patterns resulting from the construction of the Yangshan Harbour. The second (Smith et al. in Sci Rep 9:5295, 2019) presents the environmental impacts caused by the island building on top of Mischief Reef, Spratly Islands. It is the aim of this review to analyse these reports, comment on their setup and methodology, and finally discuss their conclusions.