Transcript
KELVIN PASSFIELD: The impacts on the lagoon, the impacts on our waste management facility, very visible impacts and they are having a very negative impact in some respects on tourists as well, so we would like to see those things improve before any major increase in tourism occurs.
DON WISEMAN: What negative impacts are apparent as far as the tourists are concerned?
KP: Well I think that case of the Muri lagoon a year or so ago was a classic case of negative impacts that tourists could see. They were quite disgusted in some instances at the amount of algae and that washing up on the beach at Muri, and the associated smell as it rotted away. It wasn't very good for tourism. That's improved now but I don't think it's a permanent improvement, I think it's just a fluctuation and I say it will probably be back later on with the same problem when the still water and the warmer weather comes in.
DW: Some of those issues are to do with the climate though aren't they, rather than drainage or sanitation?
KP: Yeah they are cumulative issues. But the fact that the nutrients are increasing, that are going into the lagoon, is what's favouring the growth of the algae, the still water may not be flushing it out as often as it used to get flushed out, but still the amount of nutrients going in is just going up all the time. And the density of tourism in that Muri area. Well it's very dense. Per square kilometre of area it must be the most densely populated part of Rarotonga now.
DW: Your environmental group, Te Ipukarea Society, you are not against tourism but what you are conscious of is this density and you've talked a lot about the move in some areas to AirBnB as a sort of low density alternative.
KP: Yeah I guess we shouldn't be promoting one particular agency such as Air BnB but that single holiday house accommodation where you have a local family that has an empty house and they can put on the market for short term accommodation. It's low density so it's usually one house on a quarter acre of land. It's not 50 units squeezed onto a half acre of property, so the impact of their septic systems and their laundry on the environment is much less and it much more spread out. So the environment should be able to handle a less densely populated tourism area where there's a few holiday houses. So yeah we think that's fine. That money often stays in the country as well. They are locally owned houses. People do pay a booking fee to an offshore agency quite often but the rest of the money comes into the country, it's used in the country and it revolves around the economy, as opposed to some of the resorts where the packages may be bought offshore and more of that money may stay offshore. We want to work with the tourism industry to help them become more environmentally neutral. We have got our programme where we actually get some donations through some of the tourism operators from their guests, to help us do the sort of work we do. So as we said we are not anti-tourism, we want to work with the tourism industry to make it more sustainable and then once the infrastructure is up to scratch then we could have some more tourists perhaps or try and devolve tourism to some of the outer islands. The outer islands, apart from Aitutaki, get very few tourists, so any increase, if we could divert to the outer islands that would be a win win for the country.
