What Coastal Zone Management Is, and Why the Coast Needs Its Own Law

In one line

The coast is where the land, the sea, a great many people and a very great deal of money meet, and no ordinary pollution statute can regulate it.

In the wording a student can write in an examination: coastal zone management is the regulation of the use of the land and water areas adjoining the sea, carried out in India under notifications issued by the Central Government under section 3(1) and clause (v) of section 3(2) of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 read with clause (d) of sub-rule (3) of rule 5 of the Environment (Protection) Rules 1986, by declaring defined coastal stretches and the water area up to the territorial water limit to be a Coastal Regulation Zone, classifying that zone into categories, prohibiting certain activities, regulating others, requiring a Coastal Zone Management Plan and providing for clearance and enforcement.

Why the coast needs a law of its own

It is a boundary, and boundaries fail. Water law stops at the shore, land law stops at the water, and fisheries law is about fish. The coast belongs to all three and to none.

It moves. A river bank is where it was last year. A shoreline erodes and accretes, and after a storm it is somewhere else. A regulation drawn from a fixed line has to say how the line is found and how often.

The harm is not a discharge. Almost nothing the coastal notification prohibits is pollution. It prohibits reclamation, the dressing of sand dunes, the mining of sand, the drawal of groundwater and construction within a distance. Those are land use questions, and only a land use instrument reaches them.

The pressures are extreme. India has a coastline of about seven and a half thousand kilometres. Along it are ports, refineries, power stations, tourism, aquaculture, urban expansion and roughly a quarter of the country's population within a hundred kilometres of the sea.

The people who live there are poor. Traditional fishing communities occupy the shore, own little of it in law, and are displaced by everything that is built on it. The notification of 2019 refers repeatedly to their livelihood security, which is not decoration: it is the reason several of its relaxations exist.

The four things a coastal law must do

Draw a line. From what, how far, and measured by whom. In India from the High Tide Line, generally five hundred metres landward along the sea front, and fifty metres or the width of the creek along tidal influenced water bodies, with the line demarcated by the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management.

Classify. Not every part of the coast is the same. A mangrove and a city waterfront cannot be regulated identically, which is why the notification classifies the zone rather than prohibiting uniformly.