Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Karish and Robert Faris (2004) believe that ideas and experiences from one particu-
lar location can often be generalized to public policy and land management decisions
in other areas such as, for example, the marshlands of southern Iraq. One such loca-
tion is the 500 km
2
island of Coiba located 22 km off the coast of Panama. Fourteen
scenarios and alternative futures were developed for the region (Steinitz et al. 2005;
Karish 2007). In this case, the study area included not only the island of Coiba itself
but also the surrounding mainland in order to include the primary and secondary
impacts from economic and ecological changes.
Prior to the twentieth century, the Island of Coiba had been largely untouched
by human influence. A penal colony was established in 1915 which reached its
height of occupation in the 1970s and 1980s with several thousand inmates. It was
an unusual prison colony in that the only locks were for the guards' facilities. The
prisoners themselves lived in a half dozen very informal settlements on the south-
eastern side of the island, where they engaged in subsistence agriculture. Domestic
animals such dogs, cats, cows, and water buffalo were introduced, which led to some
significant impacts in immediate areas surrounding the encampments. Despite this,
in retrospect, it was the existence of the penal colony that prevented more wide-
spread ecological changes on the island due to land clearing, such that today the vast
majority of the island still remains covered in primary forest, constituting a valuable
ecological asset for the entire region (Karish and Faris 2004) and representing one
of the most valuable tropical forest ecosystems in Central America (Steinitz et al.
2005). Presently, the penal colony is being phased out (only a handful of prisoners
are left) and the island is to be developed as a national park. The basic policy ques-
tions (Steinitz et al. 2005) are as follows: what and how much development should be
allowed, and where should development be allowed?
Coiba, like many Western Hemisphere subtropical islands, is extremely beauti-
ful with very nice beaches and dense forests. The communities on the nearby and
sparsely populated mainland coastline are very small, with many being accessible
only by boat. The economic base for the mainland coast, which is one of the poorest
areas in all of Panama, is low-productivity agriculture and small-scale fishing. With
the sole exception of tourism, there are really very few sources of potential growth.
There is currently substantial interest within the private sector tourism industry in
developing areas on both the mainland and the island. As a result, major changes
in the landscape are forecast in association with the projected increase in tourism
pressure. To understand the dynamics of these potential landscape changes, Karish
and Faris (2004) undertook a study based on creating scenarios based upon different
levels of tourism development. The principal questions addressed in the study were
as follows:
1. How to manage the national park, which is both the island as well as its
surrounding waters
2. How to shape and promote a tourism industry that is conducive to the
responsible use of the resources at the same time as stimulating economic
development in the area
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