Every year, Vietnam's maritime tourism attracts 73 percent of foreign and over 50 percent of domestic visitors. There are three out of four general tourist areas and 10 out of 17 specific tourist areas built in the sea and coastal area.
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These figures show the importance of Vietnam's maritime and island tourism. However, maritime tourism environment is under growing pressure due to inappropriate administrative measures and lack of human awareness of environmental pollution issues.
Increasing environmental pollution, decline in natural resources
The development of maritime and island tourism has created a negative impact on the coastal environment during construction process of facilities and service activities. According to scientists, about 70 percent of polluted coastal areas originates from the mainland. Construction of hotels and roads caused erosion and badly affected the river mouth ecological areas, sea grass beds and coral reef. It poses a more serious threat to Vietnam's coastal areas as nearly 1,400 hotels, restaurants and man-made beaches have been built while lacking an overall and long term planning, resulting in bad impacts on the environment.
In addition, tourism activities have caused decline and exhaustion to natural resources. Foreign experts warned that an average growth of domestic and foreign visitor arrivals to coastal regions from 12.6-16 percent per year has shown positive signs to Vietnam's maritime tourism but also raised concerns about environment pollution and exhaustion of natural resources. Production of arts and crafts made from aquatic creatures has resulted in a big decline of corals, oysters, sea snails, lobsters and tortoise-shells and affected living conditions of some kinds of birds in salt-marsh forests as well as other wild animals.
Further raising social awareness
The Deputy Head of the Vietnam Sea and Islands General Department, Nguyen Chu Hoi said one of the best solutions is to support propaganda programs to raise awareness about environmental issues among the people and the community.
In reality, over the past few years Hai Phong City and Cu Lao Cham (Quang Nam Province) have been quite successful in protecting maritime tourism environment with active participation of local people and related agencies. For example, the Management Board of Cu Lao Cham Marine Park mobilized hundreds of local people to grow corals, clear rubbish at the beach and residential areas, helping to raise their awareness in keeping the native sea and islands clean. In Hai Phong City, raising awareness about environmental issues have been conducted through popularization of legal knowledge and other television, radio programs. It also took measures to promote propaganda programs among tourists, those working in tourism sector and local people by holding talks, presenting films, photos and publication exhibitions.
However, tourism experts said Vietnam has not actually focused on announcing information about maritime tourism environmental pollution. Most of the information was at macroeconomic level and had few relations with practical circumstances at localities. Therefore, we need to boost communication strategies about our sea and islands as well as impacts from maritime tourism environment and climate change to raise awareness for the coastal community, create opportunities for them to join in sustainable maritime tourism activities or develop community-based tourism to change their jobs, improve their living conditions and alleviate poverty.