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Stilt shacks are used as sea-cucumber processing factories off the coast of Tigabu. Picture: Ben Blackledge<\/p><\/div>\n
The 2012 report estimated that eco-tourism could generate about 340 million ringgit every year for Sabah, offering a profitable alternative to fishing in protected zones, or with dynamite or cyanide.<\/p>\n
Education is key, says WWF senior programme officer Joannie Jomitol, who is based in the town of Kudat, on the northern tip of Sabah and only about 20km from Balambangan by sea. And information provided needs to be practical, making it clear to fishermen how a declining environment has already affected their catches.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you say to them, \u2018The coral is damaged. No coral, no fish,\u2019 they don\u2019t see it,\u201d Jomitol says. \u201cWhen they see coral, they see only rocks. You need to talk to them about things that relate to them, like their livelihoods.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two decades ago, fishermen will tell you, a three-day trip in local waters would have brought in enough income for several months. Today, they must voyage ever further because of depleting fish stocks. They have little choice: diversify their means of income or face increasing hardship. And considering that a subsistence fisherman in the area typically makes 400 ringgit a month, according to Jomitol, even a single tourist staying at a homestay for 50 ringgit a night would provide a significant boost to income.<\/p>\n
Indeed, despite the wide range of alternative livelihoods now available to locals, most see tourism as the panacea to all their problems. But, according to Rosalie Corpuz, eco-tourism development assistant for Coral Triangle Initiative Southeast Asia (CTI-SEA), that mindset is unrealistic and could present a problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cEco-tourism should be a supplementary income,\u201d says Corpuz, whose regional organisation is affiliated with and reports to the more expansive Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF), a six-nation project aimed at protecting marine resources that is funded primarily from government budgets and overseen by a council of ministers from participating countries. \u201cPeople have so much expectation. They think the whole community will benefit, but you have to meet in the middle. A lot of these communities are not ready for this.\u201d<\/p>\n
From 2016 until November last year, CTI-SEA ran a project called the Alternative Kudat CbEt Collective (the included acronym standing for \u201ccommunity based eco-tourism\u201d) \u2013 financed by the Asian Development Bank \u2013 that provided training, marketing and support to five villages in the marine park area, helping communities pool resources and involving groups such as youth clubs.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of these communities,\u201d says Corpuz, \u201cwhen they do stand-alone projects, are not as robust as they could be if marketing as collective, so the thing is to share one vision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Establishing eco-tourism from the ground up is based on three elements \u2013 social, economic and environmental \u2013 that together are known as the \u201ctriple bottom line\u201d, Corpuz adds, but finding the correct balance can be difficult, especially when supporting villagers who have never had to think beyond the bottom of their nets.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are so used to living a subsistence lifestyle. For them to get involved in something like eco-tourism, it\u2019s very far from what they actually know.\u201d Substantial teething problems include changing the mindset. \u201cIt\u2019s about working together, about networking,\u201d Corpuz continues. \u201cIt\u2019s not every man for himself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Initially, Alternative Kudat focused on domestic tourism because villagers feel more comfortable conversing to other Malaysians; having to speak English to international tourists, the organisers believe, could have resulted in them rejecting the initiative, and the national approach was deemed more sustainable. One entrepreneurial north Sabah villager who saw the potential was Junaidi Awang Bulat.<\/p>\n
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Exploring the mangroves from the village of Tajau Laut, northern Sabah. Picture: Lim Sheng Haw\/ADB<\/p><\/div>\n
Along the coast from Kudat, modest and rustic Tajau Laut Guest House, while certainly not aimed at the luxury end of the market, has welcomed international visitors and provides opportunities to interact with the local community through activities that include crab trapping in nearby mangroves, creating intricate batik fabrics from natural dyes, and scuba diving, the latter employing young local men as boat operators and in the filling of compressed-air tanks.<\/p>\n
With 20 years of experience in hospitality under his belt, including a role as a Sabah resort\u2019s assistant manager, Awang Bulat, 44, started the business in 2016, scraping together money from friends, family and CTI-SEA grants. Today, despite initial scepticism from naysayers in his village, he is celebrated as an eco-lodge pioneer, and has won the community over to the trickle-down benefits of eco-tourism.<\/p>\n
Tajau Laut employs seven full-time staff, while a visit to the mangroves will cost a guest 35 ringgit, a fishing trip 85 ringgit, with the entire amount being paid directly into the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the beginning a lot of people made fun of him,\u201d says Corpuz. \u201cIt takes a special kind of champion to see it through. A lot of communities have herd mentality and, when you are like Junaidi, you stray from the herd and do your own thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nestled in jungle and less than 20km away by road from Tajau Laut lies another environmentally conscious enterprise. Founded in May 2011 and the first eco-tourism resort in the Kudat area, Tampat do Aman is owned and managed by Briton Howard Stanton, one of the few foreigners running such a business in the area.<\/p>\n
Originally from Stratford-upon-Avon, Howard moved to Malaysian Borneo in 2008 to manage a resort that was never finished. The developers taught him a valuable lesson in how\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0to integrate with the local community.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just a mess,\u201d Stanton, 45, recalls. \u201cA load of white guys coming in and going, \u2018Fence it all off. This is our bit, that\u2019s your bit.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Initially viewed by locals as guilty by association, in February 2010, Stanton bought just under three hectares of land on which to create something of his own. His \u201cbasic but comfortable\u201d guest house is now praised for its forward-thinking approach to the environment, its kitchen that focuses on nutritious dishes using local produce like fresh ginger and chillies, a large conservation area and a small museum to preserve and promote the culture of the local Rungus people, an indigenous ethnic group living primarily in northern Sabah. (Tampat do Aman, in the Rungus language, means \u201cplace of peace\u201d.)<\/p>\n When Stanton takes guests on jungle treks, he is keen to pass on knowledge that he has picked up locally, pointing out medicinal plants such as yellow guava, used to treat stomach ache, or lemongrass, for hair loss. With support from the British Council, Tampat do Aman has even published, with the help of local villagers, illustrated children\u2019s books of Rungus folk tales.<\/p>\n Stanton employs 20 staff and indirectly involves many more people by outsourcing services such as laundry and vegetable growing. He ensures workers are paid more than the minimum wage of 920 ringgit a month, contributes to a staff pension fund and insures them.<\/p>\n Volunteer groups organised by Stanton have transformed the underfunded local primary school over the last five years with new furniture, books and teaching materials, built compost toilets for houses and churches, constructed two turtle hatcheries and supported an environmentally friendly laundry.<\/p>\n The ethos at Tampat do Aman is \u201clocal, local, local\u201d, explains Stanton, the entire staff recruited from the three closest villages, and then taught skills that can be passed on.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got the opportunity to do things right and show people what can be done,\u201d Stanton says. \u201cAnd hopefully, they\u2019ll copy it and head in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n Standing above the jungle canopy atop Tampat do Aman\u2019s three-storey-high watchtower, Stanton muses on what his guests are looking for. \u201cThey come here thinking they are coming to Borneo, a bastion of wildness,\u201d he says, \u201cand they are expecting to come to a place that looks after it rather than destroys it.\u201d<\/p>\n Stanton recalls a conversation he had with a Kudat government officer in November 2016. \u201cI told him, \u2018You\u2019re sitting on a gold mine: stunningly beautiful coastline, if it\u2019s done right, it\u2019ll always be a gold mine.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n After more than eight years in the area, the Briton still sees much potential, though he adds a caveat. \u201cIf they let every man and his dog come in here and do what they want to do, it\u2019ll get smashed up, destroyed, and that\u2019ll be game over,\u201d Stanton says. \u201cYou\u2019ll never get it back again.\u201d<\/p>\n Excessive tourism has been blamed for the destruction of a number of previously pristine areas of Southeast Asian coastline recently, with both the island of\u00a0Boracay<\/a>, in the Philippines, and\u00a0Maya Bay<\/a>, on Phi Phi Leh island in southern Thailand, being closed by their respective governments for periods of environmental recovery.<\/p>\n The local people in those popular resort areas, however, enjoyed the financial spoils of decades of rampant tourism before the closures, and likely will again when the beaches reopen, as they undoubtedly will.<\/p>\n Limiting tourism in and around Tun Mustapha Marine Park might be a harder sell, especially now that conservation bodies have spent much time and effort to convince locals to move away from fishing \u2013 their traditional means of livelihood.<\/p>\n Indeed, many fishermen may have already returned to their old ways, the nearly 900,000 hectares of the marine park being near impossible to police: when we left Balambangan island after exploring the cave, local fisherman Suaib Bin Seleg, 55, spoke of a dugong that had washed up dead the day before, either from drowning in a trawler\u2019s nets or from dynamite fishing.<\/p>\n Despite most fishermen\u2019s assurances that they gave up such practices years earlier, many suspect that they continue to some degree in local waters. \u201cSustainability is very elusive,\u201d says Corpuz of CTI-SEA. \u201cYou won\u2019t know if [an initiative] is sustainable for maybe 50 years. We can hope, but there\u2019s no guarantee.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The boat docks at a rickety pier and our guide leaps over the side to begin up a steep path cutting through tropical jungle. It is approaching midday and, shielded from the cooling sea breeze, the air is becoming thick and heavy. Ahead, our escort of M16-wielding soldiers (a formality, I\u2019ve been told) clambers up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-news","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3509"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3513,"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3509\/revisions\/3513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icleiseas.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}