Balancing tourists and turtles in Costa Rica

Turtles are often a draw in coastal tourism destinations. As popularity grows, though, pressure to develop more tourist accommodations creates a conflict with the need to protect the turtles’ sensitive beach habitats.

A recent paper in Conservation and Society – ‘Tourists and turtles: Searching for a balance in Tortuguero, Costa Rica’ – examines several aspects of ecotourism in Tortuguero, Costa Rica. The results raise some interesting questions about balancing the trade-offs between access to ecotourism destinations and protecting the very natural resources that tourists have traveled to see.

Cheap buses, fast Spanish, and ecotourism: Lessons from the Lakes District

I was finally on my own, traveling through the land of lagos y volcanes that Che experienced, after a conservation finance conference in nearby Valdivia. Chile is a wonderful place to visit, combining the beauty of South America with the charm of Europe. And it's cheap: a decent hostel bed is around $10, and a six-hour bus ride cost me $4. Photos from the adventure are here.

After a rest day in Puerto Varas and a climb of Volcan Osorno - a stunningly symmetrical cone overlooking a massive glaciated lake - I headed to the tourist center of the Lakes District: the town of Pucon.


I went there to visit El Cani, a forest reserve that's home to the endangered araucaria tree, which has a limited range that is pushed to its limits by the expanding development frontier. El Cani was saved from land conversion by a local ecotourism proprietor. Revenues from a nearby ecoresort were used to finance the purchase of the reserve, which has since become a tourist destination in its own right. The araucarias are still safely perched on an isolated ridge within El Cani, this tree's last remaining outpost in the region.

Pucon is overrun by touristm, but don't blame the tourists. Countless recreational activities populate the region, including an active but accessible volcano that's practically inside the city limits.

From an environmental perspective, such masses of tourists may be cause for concern. And there are undoubtedly impacts on water quality in Lago Llanquihue (though fortunately the lake is huge), and certainly local pollution from the frequent traffic jams and innumerable autobuses ferrying tourists to their daily outdoor excursions.

But clustering of tourist activities is a good thing in many contexts. Even mega-destinations, like Cancun in Mexico, could be good for conservation: although they leave a staggering imprint on local ecosystems, they provide millions of tourists with the tropical vacation experiences they demand without disturbing large tracts of intact wilderness elsewhere in the tropics. Imagine how those landscapes would hold up if all those people chose more remote destinations located closer to important tropical ecosystems.

So there are trade-offs. We think part of the solution is to promote limited tourism development that provides economic development opportunities that encourage stewardship of critical habitat for biodiversity while avoiding the environmental costs of intensive development practices. The answers won't come easily, but we're working on ways to assess these alternatives, both at the project level and at a regional scale. We see great promise in some forms of "limited development" ecotourism, and we hope to identify and promote the most responsible forms of development.

As for fast Spanish: I have a long way to go on my Spanish skills, but every visitor to Chile agrees: Chileans talk really, really, ridiculously fast.

Ecotourism vacations are short: Stay awake for them!

We traveled to Panama recently to see how communities are addressing the pressures brought on by increased tourism demand. One of the best things about ecotourism is the opportunity to witness (and support) non-tourism industries and livelihoods. And we discovered a thriving coffee industry that is alive and well in the mountains of western Panama.

An hour inland from the Pacific Coast, Boquete sits at around 1,500 meters above sea level and is surrounded by coffee plantations. There are plenty of Americans here - Boquete was featured by AARP a few years ago - but the coffee industry remains the dominant force in the local economy. A full day of walking through the surrounding hillsides opened our eyes to the vibrant and varied coffee-growing activities, all well-insulated from the growing stream of tourist traffic.

(By the way, nice to see that the local enterprises are capturing a majority of the coffee value chain: all the way from growing and harvesting the raw beans to processing, roasting and packaging.)

Although not a new concept, we think there is an under-utilized opportunity for growing tourism to be integrated with and even to benefit local coffee growers. Coffee-loving tourists, after all, love to see the plantations, a lesson the wine industry knows well.

And ecotourists, drawn to the beauty and "intactness" of the natural landscape, will no doubt demand a responsibly grown product, complete with polyculture and safeguards for biodiversity. Thus, coffee tourism can serve to protect biodiversity by ensuring responsible cultivation practices are used. In conjunction with coffee certification schemes - including fair trade, shade-grown, and the like - the coffee-drinking public will be educated about the impacts of their consumption decisions, thereby (we hope) reinforcing price premiums in the market.

In a place like Boquete, which borders a massive national park reaching across the nearby border with Costa Rica, coffee tourism could also expose visitors to the intact landscapes beyond the agricultural frontier.

Working in a fast-paced, nascent start-up, we can certainly appreciate the caffeinated pleasures of a good cup of coffee (at any hour of the day or night). To be sure, we'll be using this invaluable resource as do field research and other tasks this summer and beyond. As our work progresses, we'll be looking for opportunities to responsibly integrate important local industries with ecotourism. In the coming months, we'll be checking out coffee tourism taking place in Mexico, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Turtles and ecotourism

We watched, somewhat bemused, as National Geographic's Great Turtle Race came to a thrilling conclusion last week. The race map, along with the Olympic-caliber commentary, is entertaining.

The race, involving 11 leatherback turtles on their annual migration from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean, was a nice encore to the 2007 race from Costa Rica to the Galapagos, in which Stephen Colbert's namesake narrowly lost.

Turtles have come up a few times in our research on coastal ecotourism. After all, turtles, perhaps more than any other species, rely exclusively upon beach habitat for nesting. In southern Mexico last summer, we helped "launch" some newborn leatherback (the largest turtle species) and golfina turtles from a turtle nursery.

The nursery, called La Tortuga Feliz ("The Happy Turtle"), is notable because of the direct involvement of tourists and the local community in turtle stewardship. Also notable: about 100,000 turtles hatch at this site every year.

Sounds pretty touchy-feely, but in fact several turtle species are endangered and attract plenty of regulation from local governments - which often enact laws to protect the endangered turtles - along with conservation groups. Historically, turtle eggs have been a food source for local beach communities.

Ecotourism projects can do their part by establishing links between local environmental assets (like turtle nesting grounds) and increased tourism demand, an important industry in many coastal Mexican communities. Located within a new ecotourism resort, La Tortuga Feliz offers a chance for tourists to volunteer in the nursery, a valuable learning opportunity, not to mention an attractive selling point for the resort.

Hard to believe the newborn turtles will survive the currents, fishing nets and predators of the open ocean between Mexico and the Galapagos. But witnessing their lives on the edge made us appreciate the importance of protecting their beaches even more.

Coastal Dead Zones Are Growing

Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 By UNMESH KHER
From Time, Coastal Dead Zones Are Growing

Over the past two or three decades, scientists have noticed with growing alarm that vast stretches of coastal waters are turning into dead zones — patches of seabed so depleted of oxygen that few creatures, if any, can survive there. In 2004, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) took stock of the phenomenon — which is caused in large part by agricultural runoff — and pronounced it one of the biggest environmental problems of the 21st century. Two years later it noted that the number of identified dead zones, some of which cover thousands of square miles, had climbed from 150 to 200.

Dead zones are created when excess nitrogen and other pollutants in ocean water promote large blooms of algae and phytoplankton on the surface. The nitrogen gets there in a couple of ways: through river water filled with fertilizer from farm runoff and from air polluted with tailpipe and smokestack emissions. When the algae die and sink to the ocean floor, bacteria there break them down, while consuming pretty much all of the available oxygen in the water. The bacteria also proliferate wildly, taking over the ecosystem and exacerbating the oxygen depletion.

The best way to prevent this from happening would be to reduce the amount of nitrogen introduced into the ocean. The technology already exists to do that. If, for example, farmers in the upper part of the U.S. were given a financial incentive to plant crops like winter wheat, rather than leaving their fields fallow after the fall harvest, says marine ecologist Robert Howarth of Cornell University, much of the nitrogenous fertilizer that would normally get washed into waterways by spring thaws could instead be absorbed into winter grain crops. Measures of this sort, if uniformly implemented, could all but eliminate the Gulf of Mexico's famously ballooning dead zone.

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