A relationship between red tide outbreaks and urban development along the coasts of Guangdong Province

Red tides are one of the main coastal catastrophic events in Guangdong Province of southern China. The comparison between the number of red tide events and the development indexes of cities along the coasts of the province shows that the regional differences in red tide outbreaks has close relations with the coastal urban developments. The cause for an initiation of red tide blooms may be natural factors, while wastewater caused by the fast development of population, industry and aquiculture of the coastal cities enhanced the blooms. It may explain why the two periods of frequent outbreaks of the red tides over the last two decades matched the urban developments in the coastal areas of Guangdong not only spatially but also temporally. The red tides in the first period were restricted only to the coasts of middle Guangdong, where urbanization process was at a higher speed than the other coastal areas of the province. In the second period, fast development of the coastal cities in eastern Guangdong led to an increase in the occurrence of red tides in local sea areas of the same coasts.