The nearly abandoned Hundred Islands National Park in Alaminos, Philippines, on September 25.
Photograph: Veejay Villafranca / Bloomberg
A dip in visitors allowed nature to enter the green-covered hot spots. Now, some countries do not need to return to the destruction of mass tourism, even when Covid ends.
Thailand’s Environment Minister Varawut Silpa-archa has sought for decades to give the country’s national parks time to recover from the damage caused by countless tourists. Covid-19 gave him a chance.
Now, to see the merit of giving nature a break, Varawut goes further, decreed that all national parks in Thailand would close for an annual average of 3 months from 2021, it is an ambitious move to make the country’s important tourism industry more supporting, a move that puts it at odds with many corporations in hotspots like Phuket that are being crushed by reopening deadlines.
“We want a balance and use this pandemic as a lesson,” said Varawut, 47. “If humans continue to abuse Mother Nature, one day she will remove it. Now he’s doing it. “
Tourism was one of the biggest economic affected by the pandemic, as the industry wasted $440 million and $460 billion internationally in the first part of the year, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, but the virus, which has killed more than a million people, has also forced awareness of the environmental effects of the force generation and air travel industries.
Since Thailand banned foreign visitors because of the pandemic, more and more orcas and dugongs have been sighted in Thai waters, Varawut said. Rare wild turtles lay eggs en masse on beaches full of bathers.
Other tourism-dependent countries have discovered benefits for nature. Bryan Celeste, the 24-year-old mayor of Alaminos in the Philippines, said that in the Hundred Islands National Park of his district, local scubasurers, garbage-picking divers, were recovering a few pounds. a month recently, compared to pre-pandemic charges.
It is also pushing for longer-term tourist restrictions, even when the government faces an estimated loss of around 40 million pesos ($824,165) in profits this year, regardless of business damage.
Celeste commissioned a study on “cargo capacity” to help determine the limits of the number of visitors to the park and plans to use a virtual visitor control platform such as Visita, a local company, to help control the number of tourists.
Measures to shorten tourist seasons have faced resistance from travel-related companies, most of whom expect a resumption of the number of guests once global restrictions have been eased. Travel and tourism contributed about 12% of Southeast Asia’s GDP last year and 13% of employment, according to World Travel
“This is the rule you see on paper,” said Kalawin Kumnaung in Koh Samet, Thailand, a fireplace dance artist also known as Petch. be devastating, “said Kalawin, who also owns a bar on the island where he has lived for more than 30 years.
The tourism government is also cautioned not to appear to exclude key segments of the tourism population while selling sustainability measures, and to focus instead on “how to recover quantity and quality at the same time,” said Steve Saxon, McKinsey’s spouse
“Countries want to be careful how they communicate about cutting tourism so that it only refers to elite tourism,” Saxon said. “High-level or more prosperous tourism supports a little more in terms of jobs and GDP, but in terms of incoming flights, hotel rooms you want, it depends on the number of guests. “
Suvarin Mayazes, vice president of the Tourism Council of Thailand, said that the government should be more involved than tourists in the damage caused by illegal activities. “Only illegal fishing boats will gain from the park closure, not the environment, because they can operate freely without anyone seeing them,” said Suvarin, owner of Siam Catamaran Co. Ltd. , a diving company that operates in the popular Mu Ko Chumphon National Park.
Mobility restrictions “have hit the tourism industry, but allowed our environment to ‘rest and recover’,” said Donsol Municipal Tourism, a Filipino dive site that is home to endangered whale sharks. low season this year, as the virus attacked before the naturally quieter era from July to October, when whale sharks migrated elsewhere.
Declining tourism can also give the government the opportunity to assess the hidden prices of mass tourism, adding pollution, groundwater pollution and infrastructure.
Most countries that rely on tourism to bring their economies to life have focused more on seeking to compensate for the loss of the source of income by encouraging national downtime or using downtime to fix attractions while waiting for hordes of tourists to return. a boom in national tourism, while at Cambodia’s famous Angkor Wat temple complex, the government is adding flower beds and some 3,000 trees to the surrounding park and relocating department stores and unsightly stalls from there. ‘in front of the complex, according to a local report.
New Zealand, which also encourages locals to take national holidays, has set up an organization to read about the effect of tourism on the environment, fearing that the increase in the number of guests has begun to spoil the nation’s blank green image.
“Environmental and tourism priorities should be considered as partners in recovery,” said Billie Dumaliang, a Philippine-based environmental advocate and co-founder of Visit, which advocates higher-value, lower-volume tourism, but without government intervention to force the industry to take a more sustainable path, the avalanche of visitors can return.
“Most of the profits, such as reducing carbon emissions and pollution, are reversible once the locks are lifted,” Dumaliang said.
– With Tracy Withers and Anusha Ondaatjie