During the Sustainable Tourism Forum (STF) that started on December 3rd, the forum moderator Aishath Azfa highlighted some key obstacles in the way of achieving sustainability in the Maldivian tourism industry. And one of the biggest culprits turned out to be poor waste management.
Growing up, the word sustainable was something we came across in our social studies book for the first time. Since then, however, this word has picked up its popularity and has since merged into the marketing, travel and tourism industry.
These days it appears that everything needs to be sustainable in order to be marketable. From the clothes we choose to wear to the industries that are developing in the countries. Not saying its a bad thing, choosing sustainability is extremely important to make sure we leave as little of a negative impact on the environment as possible when we go about our day-to-day life. However, with everything getting marketed as ‘sustainable’ or ‘eco-friendly’ these days, it's just getting a bit hard to believe that sustainability at that level is reachable so fast.
The latest sustainability trend is found within the tourism industry. As people look for the word sustainability in every single thing they purchase or spend on, sustainable tourism has also picked up its popularity, especially in the most popular tourist destinations such as the Maldives.
While the tourism industry does contribute to a few things in order to be more mindful such as making the farm-to-table concept more popular, switching from plastic to glass bottles and including activities such as coral cultivation into the tourist activities. However, when one takes a closer look at these little sustainable practices, they’re not done on a large enough scale to have a real positive impact on the environment.
Doing little things towards being more sustainable are definitely a start, but we have been stuck at this stage in sustainability for years. With deeper issues such as waste management and the overall waste of food and water being overlooked, sustainability barely exists in the tourism sector.
During the Sustainable Tourism Forum (STF) that started on December 3rd, the forum moderator Aishath Azfa highlighted some key obstacles in the way of achieving sustainability in the Maldivian tourism industry. And one of the biggest culprits turned out to be poor waste management.
In her speech she highlighted the statistics noting that a person from Male’ City can produce around 1.7Kg of waste per day, an average islander produces around 0.6 Kg of waste per day, and both these numbers combined are less than the garbage produced by a tourist in a single day. Statistics show that an average tourist is capable of producing around 3.5Kg’s of garbage in a day, making them the largest producers of waste in the Maldives.
It might be easy to dismiss these numbers, but in a country like the Maldives where over a million tourists visit per year, the amount of garbage that is produced annually just by the tourism industry is quite hard to imagine. Therefore, in order to really call the sector sustainable, there needs to be some proper measures taken towards waste management in order to reduce the staggering number or garbage that is produced.
In order to help people to realise the amount of garbage they produce and to reduce these numbers, waste segregation was fully enforced in the capital city, but it only took a few months for the efforts to fall apart, and as the year comes to an end, it feels like the waste segregation operations were just a two day trial run that was never fully implemented in the country.
While the development of the tourism sector is extremely important for the Maldivian economy, the negative effects of these developments are also starting to emerge. In 2010 guest house tourism was introduced which opened the tourism industry to new heights and local islands were exposed to the industry. Even though this brought about positive impacts such as more employment and development in islands in the form of guest-houses, cafe’s and attractions, it also brought about some unwanted changes in local islands as well.
More people meant more garbage to dispose of as well as more garbage on the streets destryong the natural beauty of the island as well as the construction work towards tourist attractions bringing water and air pollution to these small islands.
The topic of sustainability is and possibly always will be a big debate, especially in the tourism industry. Regardless of any argument, however, the true form of a sustainable tourism industry can only be implemented when everyone accepts and loves countries for what they have to offer, respect the environment and people of the places they visit and be mindful of the actions they leave on mother-nature, even when on vacation.
The Maldivian tourism industry still has ways to go before achieving true sustainability, but there does seem to be small steps being taken, even by renowned brands towards achieving a more sustainable tourism industry in the country.
