Four nongovernmental organizations on Thursday submitted critical opinions to Chiba Gov. Takeshi Numata regarding the local government's revised plan to reclaim 101 hectares of Tokyo Bay's Sanbanze tidal flats.
"While the original plan has shrunk, the new one is only a condensed version of the former. There is no evidence that the prefecture has taken into account the possible environmental impact on the tidal flats," said Masahito Yoshida of the Nature Conservation Society of Japan.
The scaled-down proposal released by the prefecture on June 9 calls for the reclamation of less than one-seventh of the initially sought 740 hectares to construct a sewage treatment facility and highway.
But the plan is still unacceptable to the environmentalists of the NACS-J, the Wildbird Society of Japan, the World Wide Fund for Nature Japan and the Japan Wetland Action Network.
They said that the plan would clearly affect the ecosystems and marine environment of Sanbanze. The groups also condemn the revised plan for its feared impact on migratory birds and calls for a rethinking of the plan based on the wetland environment and not on the reclamation project.