In the state of Quintana Roo, in the Mexican Caribbean, unprecedented tourism growth overlaps with rich biodiversity. In less than 30 years, the coastal zone of northern Quintana Roo has developed from a region of laid-back fishing villages and coconut plantations into the number one tourist destination in Latin America and an important holiday getaway for millions of North Americans and Europeans. Miles of uninhabited beaches and untouched mangroves have been replaced by tourism and residential developments.

Mass development
Cancún, the main tourism destination in the Mexican Caribbean, has grown over the past three decades from a village of 12 families to a city with over half a million inhabitants and 150 hotels with more than 28,000 rooms. It receives over 3 million visitors annually. The Riviera Maya, located 60 kilometers south of Cancún, has seen an even faster rate of tourism growth. In the past decade, more than 350 hotels with 30,000 rooms were built along the Riviera Maya’s fragile coastline. The island of Cozumel, 14 kilometers east off the coast, is the world’s second most visited cruise destination after Miami. It receives almost 3 million passengers annually. On a given day, cruise passengers make about 2,000 scuba dives in and around the fragile coral reefs that surround Cozumel.

This mass tourism development has resulted in a wide range of pressures on the unique local ecosystems that include the largest underground river and cave system in the world as well as the Mesoamerican Reef which is the largest barrier reef system in the Western Hemisphere. The key threats from tourism are: (i) destruction of costal habitat caused by poorly planned tourism developments; (ii) contamination of the aquifer, the prime potable water source in the area, as a result of inadequate treatment of solid waste and waste water; and (iii) marine habitat destruction caused by direct visitor impacts. This is where the Mesoamerican Reef Tourism Initiative (MARTI) focuses its efforts. Launched in October 2004 by Conservation International (CI) with the support of The Summit Foundation, MARTI is a six-year initiative which seeks to address the major threats that mass tourism poses to the Mesoamerican Reef. It engages directly with the key sectors of the tourism industry — tourism developers, hoteliers and cruise lines — as well as state and local government.

Engaging all agents
Through MARTI, CI is working with Amigos de Sian Ka’an, a Cancún-based conservation organization, and a network of partners comprised of more than 30 private-sector businesses and trade associations, international and local NGOs, and government agencies. It aims at, firstly, changing the way new hotel developments are sited, designed and constructed, thereby ensuring that hotel developments in the Mexican Caribbean occur in a manner that incorporate sustainability and environmental issues. A second focus is on large-scale improvements in the hotel industry’s environmental performance that will bring about measurable reductions in natural resource consumption and improvements in solid waste and waste water treatment and management. Thirdly, the Initiative is working towards improved destination-level management of cruise passenger visitation impacts in major cruise ports of call in the Mexican Caribbean.

Gabriela Rodríguez Gálvez, Secretaria de Turismo, Quintana Roo, México says “in the Mexican Caribbean, the State Ministry of Tourism and civil society jointly promote the Mesoamerican Reef Tourism Initiative. This initiative is geared towards the conservation of the biodiversity of the largest coral reef in the Western hemisphere, encouraging the adoption of sustainability as a form of life and providing for the sustainable development of tourism activities in the state”.

To accomplish these results, MARTI is working with key local ‘change agents’ to promote the integration of sustainable hotel siting, design, and construction guidelines into the existing legislation – such as zoning plans, environmental impact assessments, and building regulations – through active participation in various on-going legislative formulation processes and participatory planning workshops with public and private sector representatives. Simultaneously, the Chambers of Architects and Engineers will help raise awareness of developers, architects, and building companies, about the new policies and good practices for sustainable hotel development through targeted outreach as well as training. Furthermore, the Initiative is directly engaging developers in order to secure the commitment of a handful of ‘champions’ willing to apply sustainable hotel development guidelines in all phases of their planned resort development in the Mexican Caribbean. MARTI aims to have at least one, ideally more, fully operational sustainable hotel development demonstration sites within the next four years.

MARTI is also working with the hotel industry to reduce the environmental impact caused by the daily operation of over 50,000 hotel rooms in the Mexican Caribbean. In 2007, the Initiative will work with 120 members of the Riviera Maya Hotel Association (AHRM) to introduce environmental management and encourage widespread adoption of environmental good practices for conserving water and energy, treating and managing wastewater, reducing solid waste, and managing chemicals. CI and Amigos de Sian Ka’an are expecting that, over the course of five years, MARTI’s environmental performance improvement programme will be extended to all Hotel Associations throughout the Mexican Caribbean.

Changing practices
Martín Ruiz, Director, Asociación de Hoteles de la Riviera Maya mentions that “the integration of environmental best practices in the daily operation of every hotel not only contributes to the conservation of our natural attractions that are unique in the world, but also offers an economic benefit for every business. Applied to over 30,000 hotel rooms in the Riviera Maya, the initiative helps us to secure the future of our destination”.

MARTI will also work with Cozumel’s local government to bring cruise industry stakeholders together to develop and implement a practical and feasible cruise passenger management plan that will help the local cruise tourism industry to more effectively manage the environmental impacts of cruise passenger visitation. Two high-priority conservation projects will be identified from the planning process, and CI will work with the cruise lines and Cozumel’s local Cruise Committee to implement them. In addition, CI and the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL) will assist marine recreation operators servicing the cruise lines in Cozumel to integrate operating practices for environmental sustainability into their businesses, and encourage the cruise companies to create business incentives that will encourage their marine recreation providers in Cozumel to adhere to these good practices.

MARTI is the first initiative of its kind in Quintana Roo that offers Mexico’s most important tourist destination the opportunity to direct the State’s tourism development towards a sustainable path. It is a good illustration of how CI engages with tourism industry leaders to reduce tourism’s ecological footprint and to promote conservation of environmentally sensitive tourism destinations.

It is CI’s and Amigos de Sian Ka’an’s hope that this initiative will help to significantly reduce the negative environmental impacts of tourism and contribute to achieving lasting conservation outcomes in the Mesoamerican Reef ecoregion to ensure that the very qualities that draw so many tourists to this biodiversity hotspot are maintained, and thus to demonstrate that biodiversity and human society can co-exist harmoniously.

Thomas Meller (thomasmeller@mesoamericanreef.org) is Senior Director, Mesoamerican Reef Tourism Initiative.

Jamie Sweeting (Jsweeting@conservation.org) is Senior Director, Travel and Leisure, Center for Environmental Leadership in Business at Conservation International.

Seleni Matus (SMatus@conservation.org) is Advisor, Mesoamerican Reef Tourism Initiative, Center for Environmental Leadership in Business at Conservation International.