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www.bahraintribune.com Even as the Bahrain government opens up the Kingdom’s construction industry to new avenues of materials supply, environmentalists are calling for stricter controls on the development of the Kingdom’s coastline.
According to a cross-section of environmentalists who spoke to the Tribune, while “large scale dredging and reclamation” has mauled the Kingdom’s fishing grounds and almost decimated its coral reefs, a lack of sufficient public beaches and park areas is seriously jeopardising Bahrain’s environment. Environmentalists say there is too much pressure on public recreation areas because of a lack of enough public access beaches and parks and this is leading to the deterioration of the couple of existing beaches – the strip of sand and sea near Asry and the Zallaq beach.
“The problem of trash in public areas comes more from the over-use of these areas than from a lack of public awareness,” said Dr Al Madany, Secretary-General of the National Commission for the Protection of Wildlife.
“Most of the beaches in the country are private, owned by individuals or corporations and there are just one or two that the public have access to and which have basic facilities – for example Zallaq. As for the rest, the coastal areas in Karzakan and Budaiya have not been developed as public beaches and are used by residents in these areas for lack of any other facility. Naturally they get trashed because of the lack of proper waste management and disposal facilities.”
Dr Saeed Abdullah, founder of the Kingdom’s first eco-tourism development office, Al Reem Environmental Consultation and Eco-tourism, agreed. “Bahrain has not made much effort to tackle the root cause of beach littering and park trash which is the creation of a proper infrastructure for waste disposal in these public recreation areas.
This is a two-way process. Just organising beach and camping area clean-ups by clubs and NGOs is not enough – we need to follow-through with encouragement of public action by providing proper trash disposal areas and facilities, designated barbeque sites and toilets in all public recreation areas. Besides, because of few public areas for recreation there is pressure on existing ones and they get dirty fast, especially over week-ends,” he said.
The General Manager of MBM-Alam Flora, a waste management company contracted by the Southern and Central Municipality, Zain Hassan, said there was a lot of grey area when it came to understanding who was responsible for the maintenance of public areas.
“Is it the municipality or the NGOs or should such work be done by clubs as part of community effort? I feel it should be a combination of all three so that there is a sense of involvement in the process. At present, nobody knows who is responsible and so there is a lot of buck-passing. Moreover, waste management companies like our’s have to bear the burden of the clean-up of large areas of public recreation such as the Sakhir campsites and the Zallaq beach although people from all over Bahrain come to enjoy these facilities.”
The company’s earlier plans for a contest to award prizes to the best-kept areas in Bahrain got mired in bureaucracy and is not heard about these days.
“If we institute prizes for the best-kept public recreation areas in the different governorates it may boost public involvement – there is a similar scheme in Malaysia which is very effective,” Hassan said. “As for awareness levels, I think the problem is not so much one of getting the message across as of translating the knowledge into action – everyone knows that littering is bad but it is in getting the people to actually seek out a waste bin and throw in their garbage there that we need to focus.”
Dr Ismail Madany and Dr Abdullah said Bahrain urgently needed more public recreation areas in different parts of the Kingdom as this would take the pressure off the existing ones and help regenerate them.
“To tackle the problem of litter in public recreation areas, we need to first have a policy on the creation and maintenance of these places,” said Dr Abdullah. “Only then can we plan and implement their maintenance and beautification.”
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