Tourism developers on the Riviera Maya, the region south of Cancún, are pushing to change the rules to allow the construction of more golf courses in the area. Scientific studies are unanimous that golf courses are environmentally incompatible with coral reefs. The group that makes the rules for the Riviera Maya is called POET (Programa de Ordenamiento Ecológico Territorial) and CEA sits on the POET committee along with two other environmental NGOs, developers and government officials. Although CEA is an organization devoted to research and sustainable solutions, as opposed to protest, this proposal directly affects CEA’s mission to protect the Great Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System and we will work to defeat it.

To this end, Charles Shaw, Executive Director of Centro Ecológico Akumal (CEA) and Rogelio Villavicencio, Director of CEA’s Turtle Protection Program, attended the POET meeting held on June 10 in Playa del Carmen hoping to convince the committee to delay a vote until more studies can be made. They were pleased that the majority of those attending voted in agreement. To learn more about the facts that Shaw and Villavicencio presented please read Par for the Course Why Golf Courses are Incompatible with Coral Reefs.

One might wonder what stopping the development of golf courses along the Yucatán coast in México has to do with most of us. The Great Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second longest coral reef in the world, extends along the Caribbean coast from Cancún to Belize, Guatemala and Honduras and is a global treasure of biodiversity. This coral reef is in grave danger of destruction from the effects of overuse by the tourism industry. The heavy use of fertilizers on golf courses, especially, sends nutrients to the ocean where they feed aquatic plants, mostly algae, which smother the reef.

Though you may not be fortunate enough to live along a beautiful tropical reef, fertilizers in lakes, rivers or other coastal shorelines create similar threats. Shaw put it in perspective for this writer, who lives on the coast of S.C., like this: “About your coast, I would say that while the lack of coral reefs that far north is a large difference, the presence of plant nutrients can cause eutrophication (the removal of oxygen from the bottom waters) and, therefore, the death of bottom-dwelling creatures, such as shrimp, lobster and shellfish. The coastal wetlands also can become eutrophied with the same result on the ecosystem there.” Shaw encouraged me to ask, “Is the condition of the shrimp, lobster, and shellfish industries in trouble? Have catches declined in recent years? Are there dead zones offshore?” The results of recent studies including the report from the PEW Foundation show that the answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. To that Shaw adds, “If so, are these related to places close to river mouths? The southeastern coast of the U.S., for example, where golf courses are in abundance, is unlike the Yucatán in that it is not a limestone coast but is underlain by sands and clays. The ground water moves slowly through the pore spaces in the sediments and can take a long time, many years, to reach the coast. Naturally, sources of contamination close to the coast reach the ocean faster. Sources well inland can take decades to move through the sands. Another factor is the location of various industries on the rivers. Contamination entering the ground water will move toward the nearest stream or lake where it then can move to the ocean in weeks as part of the surface flow. Underground movement, as we said, is much slower. Nevertheless, once nutrients load a body of water, a lake, stream or ocean, the result is the same - eutrophication.”