A recent article in Science News shows that ecotourism isn’t always a win-win for nature and local economies. Researchers studied Humboldt penguins on three neighboring islands off the coast of Chile, and found that penguins on the island with the fewest visitors (about 100 per year) had three times the number of offspring as those on an island with over 10,000 visitors per year. A study in the Bahamas found unexpected population changes in Allen Cays rock iguanas after an expansion of ecotourism there, and hypothesized that those changes could also have negative effects on endangered Audubon’s shearwaters. Waste is piling up in Tortuguero, Costa Rica, where 87,000 visitors per year come to watch sea turtles lay their eggs. And the opening of Kakum National Park in Ghana has pushed the local unemployment rate from 3 to 27 percent, as villagers are excluded from former income-producing activities in the rainforest.
Source: Jaffe, Eric. Good Gone Wild: Sometimes, ecotourism hurts what it sets out to help. Science News, Week of Sept. 30, 2006; Vol. 170, No. 14 , p. 218.
Image source: http://www.justbirds.org
