Paper short abstract:

The paper will analyze how value of wetlands dramatically changes in East Asia. For so doing, it focuses on cultural, economic and ecological aspects.

Paper long abstract:

This study will focus on the Korean Peninsula as a case study, which has rich coastal tidal flats.

These tidal flats were considered as "useless" in the past and were subjects of landfill and land reclamation. However, the recognition of tidal flats is currently changing towards "beneficial natural environment" under modern environmental discourse. Preservation of the natural environment is a global mission and tidal flats are being respected as an environment to retain biodiversity.

This paper takes the modern environmental context into account and analyzes the value of tidal flats in East Asia. Traditional knowledge and practices about nature do not always match with the requirement from the international community. This requirement here indicates the practice of environmental protection defined in the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Ramsar Convention. The Korean peninsula has rich traditional knowledge and practice on wetlands. Some of the local knowledge and practice has been accepted, other will be negative and new knowledge to be cleated there. The paper discusses the creation of new value of tidal flats under the intersection of traditional knowledge, national policy, and international environmental principle.