Sun, sea… sustainability

With holidaymakers increasingly central to Mexico’s economy, can the industry ever become truly sustainable? Ron Mader and Ben Tuxworth scan the horizon.

Mexico – there’s nowhere like it for a holiday. Good transport links by land, air and sea. A world famous cuisine, with more uses for corn than Peru can manage for potatoes. A showcase of the world’s ecosystems. Small wonder that tourism is one of the country’s top income generators. Mexico is the number one destination for tourists in Latin America. In 2006, tourism provided 14% of the country’s employment, with 21.4 million visitors generating $12.17 billion. And when tourism suffers, so does the rest of the economy, as witnessed in the southern state of Oaxaca, where social protests in 2006 led to a loss of tourism in succeeding years, with disastrous consequences for local artesanos and other businesses.

Though at times tourism and conservation seem stranded on either side of an unbridgeable divide, they are slowly learning to tread the same path. ‘Ecotourism’ has been an important part of that transition, and for a range of operators in Mexico it is increasingly profitable. Environmentalists do take issue with the way the term is often used to describe any type of nature-based tourism. But there’s no doubt that even these holidays do encourage environmental conservation and local participation.

“Ecotourism is not your typical market,” says Kenneth Johnson, owner of the Ecocolors tour company based in Cancún. “It’s not like conventional business where the main concern is profit, profit, profit. Yes, money is one of the components but it’s not the only focus. You have to take care of the environment people are visiting or you end up screwing your business.”

Of course, nature tourism is not new to Mexico. Individual travellers have long raved about the country’s natural wonders – and in the 1990s they were followed by the packaged tours. Whether to watch birds or whales, people began visiting the great outdoors to experience the diversity and beauty of nature. Tourism providers discovered the accompanying economic benefits of offering natural history tours, and host communities began to see that ecotourism offered the potential to diversify their income base.

But the need to protect the natural wonders from the tourists themselves initially gave ecotourism something of a bad name, with conservationists rejecting an unappealing commoditisation of wildlife, and tour operators dismissing the more complicated and less marketable eco-trips as nothing more than utopian whimsy.

“One problem is that ‘ecotourism’ is too often confused with adventure tourism – sporting activities in a natural setting which usually offer limited benefits to poor rural communities and pay little attention to conserving the natural environment,” says architect Hector Ceballos-Lascurain, the man credited with coining the term in the 1980s. “Another drawback in Mexico is that many of the ecotour operators are addressing the domestic market and hardly trying to attract international ecotourists, thus missing out on the possibility of attracting large amounts of foreign currency – something which is badly needed in our country.”

Until recently, most of Mexico’s protected areas and biosphere reserves, covering 12% of the country, were simply off-limits to tourism. The Government tried to keep these areas free of visitors, due to the lack of qualified park guides and adequate protection for their fragile ecosystems. It didn’t have to try too hard: many of the protected areas were too far from the main tourism corridors to attract many visitors anyway. Now, however, it’s changing tack, and starting to open protected areas to tourism.

“We are finally recognising that it’s not just about doing more, but doing things better”

Given the diversity of Mexico’s wildlife and natural attractions, a broad approach to tourism in the country makes sense. Since 2002’s International Year of Ecotourism, development is increasingly financed by various governmental and non-governmental institutions. “We have advanced a great deal in the past ten years,” says Johnson. “We are finally recognising that it’s not just about doing more, but doing things better.”

Recent achievements reflect a slowly but steadily maturing understanding and engagement. A revitalised national association for ecotourism and adventure tourism operators, AMTAVE, is one of the first in the world to bring together small businesses to promote their shared offer. In 2008 the association launched a promotional campaign, ‘México Sagaz’ (meaning ‘Astute Mexico’). And in November, Mexico’s Tourism Secretariat announced that it would double its budget for nature-based travel and ecotourism, committing 500 million pesos to the sector and more than 100 million pesos to national and international promotion.

Baja California is making great efforts to shift its economy away from fishing and commerce towards ecotourism. Back in 2000, the state made the news when a presidential decree prevented a major salt plant from expanding into breeding areas of the grey whale. Thanks to pressure from environmental groups, more than 200 islands and inlets in the Gulf of California are now under UNESCO protection, offering great opportunities for diving, snorkelling and kayaking. The Governor made the state’s commitment to ‘environmental tourism’ official a few years ago, when he ruled that it “must be the main attraction in Baja California”.

Ecotourism is, of course, only a small part of Mexico’s tourism market, and plans such as those for Yucatán’s coastal zone have to take into account the current and potential impacts of ‘conventional’ tourism. The once remote Riviera Maya in Quintana Roo now hosts colossal numbers of North American and European tourists seeking their fix of sun, sea and sand. Cruise liners ply back and forth to Cozumel island ferrying five million visitors a year, and from Cancún in the north, a strip of hotels and beach resorts lines the coast past Playa del Carmen, Tulum and on towards the Sian Ka’an nature reserve in the south. Here, the classic problems of bulk tourism pile up, with loss of habitats, unsustainable water use and pollution. Not to mention damage to the world’s second largest coral reef, which, extending south to Belize, is an important part of the tourist experience.

Tackling these impacts is the Mesoamerican Reef Tourism Initiative (MARTI), a partnership of local NGO Amigos de Sian Ka’an, the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL) and Conservation International (CI). MARTI is working on three fronts: CI is taking on the cruise lines; CORAL is re-educating marine recreation operators, and Amigos is running environmental management programmes for hotels.

CI has been working with the Cruise Lines International Association to map sensitive marine environments and add them to navigation charts, and developing a range of awareness-raising activities with passengers and tour operators. In the pipeline are new voluntary codes of practice for the industry and efforts to get cruise line procurement to favour responsible tour operators. There will be shore excursion procurement guidelines, too, and an accompanying scorecard for cruise lines to verify that their contractors are meeting good practice standards.

MARTI is also working to reduce the water and energy use, and solid waste generation, of the 24,000 hotel rooms in the Riviera. Thomas Meller, the MARTI Project Director for Amigos de Sian Ka’an, and his team assess hotels against an exhaustive list of 225 standards, and work with the in-house green team on an action plan. By early 2009 they had registered some 30 hotels, taking the initiative past the 10,000-hotel-room mark on the Riviera Maya and Cozumel Island.

“Almost all MARTI hotels have active Green Teams implementing action plans based on our initial environmental audit and opportunity analysis,” says Meller. The action plans focus on reducing natural resource use, including water, energy and materials, and improved waste management, plus environmental education. Action ranges from the familiar invocation to reuse towels, to waste separation, installing water-saving devices and training staff to ensure proper implementation.

Certification is becoming an important part of the hotel offer. Promoting those that reach green standards is the focus of a new European campaign run by MARTI, WWF and the Tour Operators’ Initiative (a UN- and WTO-backed group of international tour operators, including players such as TUI Travel PLC and Kuoni Travel, who are committed to the development of more sustainable tourism).

With so much new development coming on stream, MARTI is lobbying to get sustainability criteria built into local and federal legislation, and working with the State Ministry for Tourism on a guide for the sustainable siting, design and construction of hotels and resorts. WWF is also developing a national standard on tourism-related infrastructure in collaboration with the NGO Amigos de Sian Ka’an and the Environment Ministry.

Greening the honey pots

Meanwhile, other organisations are trying to address the wide range of tourism impacts in the area. The UK Government is working with its Mexican counterpart on a scheme to improve environmental standards in 30 large hotels on the Caribbean coast, as part of the UK-Mexico Sustainable Development Dialogue. The Travel Foundation has recently teamed up with local NGO Biocenocis and the Mexican Institute of Anthropology and History to produce protection guidelines for Tulum, where growing numbers of visitors have begun to overwhelm this unique Mayan monument. And back at Cancún they’re looking at a project to manage the 34 tonnes of solid waste generated each week at the airport by the million or so passengers that pass through each year. They're getting to grips with golf, too, working with Hilton and other major resort hotels on best practice on water management, herbicides, pesticides and wildlife conservation.

With the World Economic Forum forecasting Mexico’s tourism industry to grow by 5% per year to 2017, the aim must be to spread these promising initiatives – and many others like them – throughout Mexico.

This article is part of the Green Futures Special Publication Viva la vida verde, in which we set out the key sustainability challenges facing Mexico, and showcase some of the innovative green breakthroughs under way. Read more articles here.

27 February 2009

Ben Tuxworth and Ron Mader