BRIDGETOWN – MOUNTING piles of garbage and sewage are burying small islands and turning away tourists, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a study released to the world’s environment ministers at a summit on water and sanitation issues in Jeju, South Korea.

According to the study, an “exploding” tourism industry has created a new trend of health and economic hazards in the Caribbean and Pacific, leaving a “paradise” lost of island nations, which have neither the space nor the money to dispose of garbage and sewage.

“Many small island paradises are heaving under rising levels of rubbish and waste,” the study continued.

Klaus Toepfer, UNEP’s executive director, noted that small islands across the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and the Pacific are some of the most vulnerable nations on earth because of their remote location and limited natural resources.

“They are threatened by global warming in the guise of more extreme weather events and rising sea levels, and their water supplies are often restricted.”

In addition, Toepfer pointed out that the handling of solid wastes from industry, households and tourism was emerging as another “issue” with which small islands needed “advice and help.”

Garbage now rates among rising sea levels, overfishing and water shortages as a top danger to these small island developing states (SIDS), and may, in turn, lead to turned-off tourists, UNEP said.

UNEP warned that rapid, unchecked development could backfire on the islands, as environmental degradation spoiled their allure as a tourist destination. The shoreline of the Pacific island of Nauru, for example, appears blue-green in aerial photos, not from coral reefs, but from mounds of discarded beer cans, UNEP said.

This study by the UNEP came a decade after a landmark world conference met to plan for the sustainable future of the world’s small islands.

Since the 1994 Barbados summit on small island states, the level of plastic waste on many of these islands has grown five times, said the study. In the Caribbean, about 90 per cent of untreated sewage is discharged into the sea; in the Pacific, about 98 per cent.

Worldwide, about one in 20 people become ill from swimming in waters polluted by sewage, said Veerle Vandeweed, who coordinated the study.

Ironically, most of the environmental damage from tourism comes during the construction of resorts, not their operation, because of decisions to build too close to fragile coastlines and industrial waste, Vandeweed said. In the Caribbean alone, the number of tourists rose 19 per cent to 17.1 million a year from 1993 to 1997.

The piled-up trash also encourages vermin such as rats, which carry such diseases as leptospirosis, plague, scabies and other tropical illnesses.

Polluted coastal waters were also linked to oxygen-starved “dead zones”, threatening fish and marine life and undermining traditional island fishing industries.

The allure of Nauru and other so-called “paradise islands” that are dependent on tourist dollars for survival is rapidly vanishing, and they need urgent help in managing a problem they are unable to deal with alone, UNEP continued.

“Such wastes are not only unsightly and a threat to wildlife, they can also contaminate rivers and ground waters as they slowly degrade,” Toepfer remarked.

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a group of 45 island nations, is working with aid agencies, the private sector and other governments to gain access to better waste disposal technology and funds, said AOSIS chairman Jagdish Koonjul of Mauritius.

Koonjul said the islands’ sanitation problems had worsened because of the lack of fresh water. He linked this to rising ocean levels worldwide, triggered, in part, by global warming, which have meant that freshwater wells were increasingly tainted with seawater.

The discussions in Jeju, a South Korean resort island, will likely be followed up when the UN hosts a ten-year review of the progress made by the world’s small island developing states (SIDS) in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in late August.

“Barbados Plus 10” is a follow-up conference to the landmark Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States, held in Barbados in April 1994.

The global conference was seen as the first global partnership for sustainable development since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, a UN conference on environment and development.

Caribbean ministers met in the Bahamas in January this year to prepare for the “Barbados Plus 10” summit. The officials sought to generate ideas on how to deal with such issues as the rising level of seas due to global warming, vulnerability to storms and hurricanes, coral reef protection, trade, tourism, freshwater shortages, energy, transport and communications, and HIV/AIDS.

– GREENWIRE