By Guido Calderón.
In an effort to increase domestic tourism, the government eliminated the entrance fee to Ecuador's forty-seven protected areas months ago. These areas are characterized by their scenic beauty, biodiversity and endemism, making them very attractive destinations. However, this increase is worsening the problems that already existed due to overcrowding and lack of control; thus, with the exemption of the fee, the structures are collapsing.
For example, the Chimborazo Wildlife Reserve registers 56,000 tourists a year and only has four toilets. The garbage dumps had to be removed because the park rangers were not able to remove so much garbage and now the only thing that is done is to instruct the visitor to take it with them.
The Llanganates National Park, which received 3,000 visitors in 2011, has already exceeded 2,000 in the first four months of this year, which has park rangers in a bind, as they foresee major environmental impacts that are difficult to reverse in these sensitive and fragile areas with an endemic species that, once affected, the damage is irreversible.
In the Sangay-Llanganates Ecological Corridor alone, there are more than five hundred species of birds and one hundred and ninety endemic plants, while in the Galapagos there are ninety species of birds and one hundred and eighty species of plants. This shows that we have very valuable genetic treasures on the continent, which are unprotected and now face a dangerous overload of visitors.
The Atillo – 9 de Octubre highway, part of the famous Guamote – Macas, could have been the greatest natural attraction in continental Ecuador, as it crosses the heart of the Sangay National Park, a World Natural Heritage Site. Today it is completely invaded and deforested. It is the most savage and terrible ecological disaster that we have committed in the last decade. No one was supposed to live there and there are already entire villages that live off logging and hunting.
The income received by protected areas is meager and their poorly equipped park rangers can do little in the face of the permanent invasion of ranches, peasants and indigenous communities by cattle ranchers, a prelude to the felling of forests and then crops, systematically destroying the moors, water sources and Andean slopes, which causes flooding on the coast and in the Amazon.
The management of protected areas is not changing. A Ministry of the Environment with paltry income, few staff, and an obsolete legal framework is unable to stop the invasion, colonization, destruction of forests, illegal fishing and hunting, and now they are faced with an avalanche of national visitors with no prior education or environmental awareness.
Originally published at: TrafficNews.
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