How Bonaire Is Fighting To Keep Its Number One Tourist Attraction

14.04.2024 - 12:07 / forbes.com

Bonaire's number one tourist attraction is in trouble.

You can see it as soon as you submerge into the flat-calm, teal ocean and find a graveyard of bleached coral. Years of pollution, climate change and disease have taken their toll on Bonaire's marine life. The Caribbean island, perhaps one of the greatest scuba diving destinations on earth, is fighting to keep its once-vibrant reefs.

But if you look beyond the dead coral lining the shallow waters near the shore, you'll see something else: Trees made of PVC pipe, from which new coral is growing. These nurseries are part of Bonaire's efforts to save the reef — and tourism.

In Bonaire, sustainability is a do-or-die proposition. If this island doesn't do something soon, its reefs could perish — and the reason so many people come to this tropical island will evaporate. But there are other equally important sustainability efforts underway, including a focus on solar energy and an innovative cooking school that specializes in growing its own food.

Last week, in the first part of my series on tourism and sustainability, we visited Panama — a destination that has embraced sustainability despite the environmental destruction caused by the Panama Canal. Today, we're moving on to Bonaire, a small island off the coast of Venezuela that needs to become sustainable if it wants to survive as a tourism destination.

Bonaire is heavily dependent on tourism. In 2023, it had 169,706 overnight visitors, about the same as the previous year and surpassing the prepandemic 2019 numbers by almost 8%. Most visitors come from Europe, and most come to dive and snorkel its famous reefs. Tourism accounts for more than 40% of economic activity and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year.

Paul Coolen, manager of Buddy Dive Resort Bonaire, the location of one of the coral nurseries, says repairing the coral reefs is an existential issue.

"We want to be Buddy Dive," he says. "Not Buddy Dove."

Buddy Dive and other dive shops in Bonaire are part of an island-wide effort to regrow coral. It's being coordinated through Reef Renewal Foundation Bonaire, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting and restoring Bonaire’s coral reefs through a large-scale reef restoration program.

Coolen says there are two reasons to bring back the coral. Obviously, undoing the destruction caused by runoff from sewage and chemicals is the right thing to do. But it’s also good for business.

"If there's no coral, there's no fish," he says. "If there are no fish, there are no visitors."

How do dive shops like Buddy Dive help? They offer a special reef renewal class through the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI). After students complete a two-day course, they're