If you still haven’t been to Apo Island, you’re missing out on what many consider as the best attraction of Negros Oriental.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Negros Oriental Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Apo Island is Negros Oriental’s biggest tourist draw. Because of its beautiful underwater life, photographs of the Island have been published in dive magazines and before we realized it, everyone got to know of Apo Island that tourists kept coming in droves.
Apo Island, because of the number of visitors it attracts each year, gives businesses to our hotels, restaurants, public utility vehicles, boat operators, and the other stakeholders of the tourism sector, which, ultimately and inevitably, includes you and everyone else.
The best feature of Apo island is the marine sanctuary — a coral reef measuring 450 meters wide and which extends 500 meters out from the shore — located on the southeast portion of the island.
Started some 30 years ago by the islanders with support and encouragement from scientists at Silliman University, the sanctuary, otherwise called the no-fishing zone, gave the fishers more fish to harvest. The residents of Apo, mostly fishers, no longer had to go to neighboring islands like Mindanao, to fish.
But tropical storm Sendong and typhoon Pablo struck a big blow to Apo Island: they decimated the marine sanctuary, to a point that it now has less than one percent of corals left.
Apo Island Barangay Capt. Liberty Pascobello-Rhodes said the residents are fearful of what tomorrow would bring, as memories of the hard times they encountered as fishers in the late 60s to early 70s in Mindanao keep coming back to haunt them.
They may be fearful, but they have not lost hope, as individuals, the scientific community, and NGOs have joined hands with government agencies in finding ways of rehabilitating the reef.
Along with this ambitious project is the establishment of a new marine sanctuary on the western side of the Island, protected from future typhoons.
“There is hope, but we need to act now,” a Greenpeace campaigner said last Friday.
If you still haven’t been to Apo Island, you might think all these things do not concern you.
But it does. The storms that hit Apo Island was a result of climate change. In our own small way, we can help minimize the effects of climate change right where we live. Tree planting, reduced use of plastics, proper waste disposal such as waste segregation, and not burning garbage (not even cut grass and fallen leaves), for instance, can go a long way in making the world a better place to live in.
What can you do today?
