Assessing COVID-19’s “known unknowns”: potential impacts on marine plastic pollution and fishing in the South China Sea

This paper examines three of the COVID-19 pandemic’s “known” impacts to date: its widespread and fundamental altering of government policy priorities; record low oil prices and its role in further escalating already heightened levels of strategic competition in East Asia and weakening of the existing multilateral order. The paper then uses some of the observed outcomes of these changes under the pandemic so far, in addition to additional evidence and causal linkages drawn from past research, to assess COVID-19’s potential, but still unknown, longer term influence on marine plastic pollution and overfishing in the South China Sea, two of East Asia’s most pressing marine environmental problems. In addition to flagging potential COVID-19 linked issues of concern in these two important policy areas, this approach also may assist further inquiry into the pandemic’s still unknown potential to undermine environmental protection and regulatory efforts in other environmental issue areas.