Galapagos placed on the UNESCO List of World
Heritage in Danger
Chrstchurch
CNH Tours
has learned that the
In an
interesting twist, the Government of Ecuador itself has asked that the WH
Committee place Galapagos on the Danger List just last week.
UNESCO
states that Danger Listing is not a punishment, but rather a tool to raise the
profile of a particular site so that more political and financial pressure can
be brought to bear on finding permanent solutions to the problems. Danger listing is not expected to affect
travel plans to the islands, and cruises will run as programmed.
More info...
The human
presence in Galapagos has changed tremendously in Galapagos over the past 40
years, when the first ever organized 66 passenger tourist cruise took place
(operated by Lindblad Travel in 1967 – precursor to
the current Lindblad Special Expeditions, which now
operates the Polaris and the Islander in Galapagos). In 1967, barely 2,000 people lived in
the islands, electricity was provided for a few hours per day, people survived
on little more than subsistence agriculture, fishing and basic government
services.
Today, over
30,000 people live in the islands and have 24 hour electricity, internet cafes
and mobile phone service.
Most live directly or indirectly from tourism. The fishing industry, peaking in the
1990’s has dropped significantly due to overfishing of
lobster and sea cucumbers. A small
number of people live off agriculture.
The number of visitors to the islands has been increasing by well over
10% per year for the past several years, currently standing an nearly 120,000.
To meet these needs, several cargo ships visit various ports on the
islands on a weekly basis, bringing food and materials from the continent, and there are approximately 30 commercial airline
flights a week arriving from the mainland.
The main
threats to Galapagos related to the introduction of non-native species. Having emerged from the ocean depths 4-5 million years ago, the island ecosystems are
made up of only those plants and animals that were able to make it to the
islands on their own – either by flying, or floating across. Over hundreds of thousands of
years, these occasional arrivals evolved into distinct species, adapted to the
Galapagos environments – which is notoriously free of
predators and competitors. The
massive arrival of
new species since humans first started colonizing the islands in
the early 1800’s has put a great deal of pressure on the native species. Though some are now extinct, most still
survive, but are under increasing pressure from the accelerating introduction of
non-natives.
Non-natives
are introduced either on purpose by island residents (e.g. cats, dogs,
livestock, ornamental plants, farm plants) or by accident (rats, cockroaches,
mosquitos, diseases, weeds), hidden in ship or
aircraft cargo-holds. The
rapidly increasing traffic of people and goods between Galapagos and the
continent has created an ecological bridge to the islands, resulting in growing
opportunities for non-native species to come to the islands.
Ship based
tourism has few direct impacts on the Galapagos environment. Visitors do not intentionally
introduce non-native species, and their footprint on the islands is rigorously
restricted to a small number of visitor sites. Indirectly, tourism does
contribute to the growing island economy by creating a vigorous demand for
labour and services on the islands (ship crews, guides, mechanics,
administrators, along with their families and their needs – teachers,
construction workers, food provision etc.). It is this growing island population,
largely via immigration, that is at the root of the challenges – as population
grows, so does the volume of traffic of goods from the continent, and the
opportunities for the introduction of non-native species and so does political
pressure for further development. Fortunately, ship based tourism has
been relatively well regulated in Galapagos, meaning that there has been only
modest growth in the total available ship berths in the past several years. As job opportunities stabilize,
the appeal to would-be immigrants drops and a stable
situation can be reached whereby effective management and control measures can
be implemented.
One
worrying trend has been the growing popular demand to open up land based tourism
in the islands. Residents are
clamoring for a “share of the tourism pie”,
disregarding the fact that 75% of the local economy is already directly or
indirectly related to tourism. Land
based tourism (e.g. hotels, restaurants, island hopping excursions, lesser
capacity to control activities) has the potential for much greater growth, and
would re-ignite the migratory pressures to the islands and with it, an increase
in the arrival of non-native species. CNH Tours considers such a tourism model
as a potentially harmful new direction, as it would open up a whole new economic
growth sector which would be much more difficult to control than it is to put a
cap on the number of ships.
Full report
on the 2006 UNESCO mission to Galapagos
http://whc.unesco.org/archive/2006/mis1bis-2006.pdf
English
language version of the April 10th 2007 Presidential
Decree
http://www.darwinfoundation.org/files/newsroom/07-04/Presidential_Decree.doc