Monitoring and management of tourist landing sites in the Maritime Antarctic ...

• Main Author: Crosbie, Paula Kim
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository 1999
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; South Shetland Islands
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.44989; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/297935

Tourism is the most recent large-scale human activity in the Antarctic. The 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty requires that all activities in the Antarctic, including tourism, shall "be planned on the basis of information sufficient to allow prior assessments of, and informed judgements about their possible impacts ... and ... regular and effective monitoring shall take place to allow assessments of the impacts of ongoing activities." As yet there is an acknowledged lack of hard data on the effects of tourism on the Antarctic environment, and no such monitoring programme exists. Because of its scale and environmental context, shipborne tourism is likely to disturb Antarctic ecosystems. 96.5% of all Antarctic tourists are shipborne and over 90% of their visits are to the Maritime Antarctic (Antarctic Peninsula and South Orkney and South Shetland Islands), Antarctica's ecologically richest area. This study is founded on the author's five years of research, both at a field ...