The Economic Impact of Industry on Coastal and Off-Shore Areas

Along with many changes that are taking place in the various fields of industrial development, what about the increasing confrontations with complex economic, political and environmental changes occurring with respect to coastal and offshore areas? The energy crisis alone raises serious questions which are of vital concern to these disciplines. New demands for maintaining and improving the quality of the coastal environment are raising perplexing questions for science and technology. Indeed, the exploitation of coastal resources poses problems of tremendous significance. In developing nations, the conflict between industrialization and urbanization on the one hand and ecological understanding and developmental restraint on the other is fairly well defined where land and water meet at the edge of the sea. There is certainly a need to keep in balance the requirements of the economy and the imperatives of the ecology. This paper reviews some of the exploitation threats by private enterprise and raises the challenge of a widening concern for solutions to these questions.