Was it just you or was there really a nasty smell on Boracay the last time you were there? You weren’t imagining things. Asahi Shimbun reports that some people attempting to save on sewage bills have been connecting their waste pipes to those meant for rainwater – which weakens the corals and decreases the supply of sand to the island. Kazuo Nadaoka, a professor specializing in water environment at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, was invited by Miguel Fortes, a professor of marine ecology at the University of the Philippines, to join a research project on the island. They installed cameras to observe changes in the coastline, and conducted water quality tests at about 30 locations on the island.
Boracay – voted No. 1 beach location in Asia on Tripadvisor.com and ranked No. 2 by Travel+Leisure readers in its World’s Best survey – welcomed 1.206 million visitors in 2012, “huge numbers for an island that is only 10 square kilometers…There is a deep relationship on Boracay between human activities and the ocean ecosystem. That has led to not only structural changes affecting living things, such as a decrease in coral, but also beach erosion,” warned Nadaoka.
