As spring break arrives just around the corner, thousands of tourists will be boarding cruise ships and heading off to an exotic destination. With the ocean being the Earth’s greatest abundance of biodiversity, how exactly will these cruise lines keep the Earth in mind?

With nearly 3 million passengers each year boarding vessels and heading off to Cozumel, Mexico, the Caribbean tourism industry is starting to recognize the potential damage that they might be causing on the environment. These effects include: the spectacular coasts and marine life that are the region’s main attractions.

Carnival Cruise Ship

Starting this April, change will happen. Representatives from cruise lines, trade associations, international and local nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies will get together and examine the Caribbean’s primary environmental concerns and what can be done to change and improve them.

The Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB) is a year-long program designed to help businesses identify and implement sustainable operating practices. These operating practices include voluntarily designating areas to avoid discharging waste-water. The programs also aims in collaborating more effectively with the cruise tourism industry so that it can assist governments in minimizing environmental impacts. Currently, there are plans underway to expand the initiative to ports in Honduras and Belize.

Seleni Matus of CELB’s Mesoamerican Reef Tourism Initiative says that “It will be the first time dialogue of this kind has happened between all key actors on such a large scale in the region.” The cruise industry is working aggressively with partners to educate crew and passengers, develop new business practices, and most importantly to protect habitats that are rich in biological diversity, like the ocean.

BP is moving in the right direction. Last fall in Indonesia, BP announced that due to environmental sensitivites, the corporation will reroute its tankers away from Indones’s fragile Sagewin Strait. This new route adds 550 kilometers to the tankers’ route. BP is willing to pay a little extra and spend a little more time in order to perserve the Sagewin Strait.

It’s nice to see that BP’s decision ensures that tankers do not harm the Sagewin Strait’s unique underwater species, including certain dolphin and whale populations considered threatened by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). It’s a move in the right direction that corporations are starting to see the effects that their companies are having on the environment and what specific routes they need to take in order to improve the Earth we live on. If every company soon realized they need to change, then their would be a big improvement in the environment.

Sources:

http://www.conservation.org/xp/frontlines/2007/02260701.xml

http://www.celb.org/xp/CELB/partners/com/bp.xml

Picture Sources:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Carnival_Victory_St_Thomas.jpg