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nesting habitats for sea turtles on the Yucatan Peninsula's Caribbean coast has sparked an outcry from environmentalists. X'Cacel beach, a 2.5 km (1.6 miles) stretch of beach and mangrove, lies roughly 120 km (75 miles) south of Cancun. Green (Chelonia mydas), Loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) turtles visit the beaches' dunes to nest from mid-May until mid-September. 

It has been reported that a Spanish hotel chain, Sol Melia, and a local Mexican politician and developer have purchased in total over 100 ha (235 acres) of beachfront and mangrove for tourism development. This has occurred after years of lobbying on the part of researchers and activists to designate X'Cacel a protected area.

According to sea turtle researchers X'Cacel contains the highest density of sea turtle nests per kilometer of beach (160 nests per km) in all of Mexico. Recent studies have demonstrated that the Green and Loggerhead turtle populations utilizing the area around X'Cacel may account for as much as 30% of the genetic information for these two species in the Atlantic. The concerns of turtle researchers and activists surround the destruction of nesting sites by development and pollution, as well as the effects of lights. Sources of man-made illumination can disorient both egg-laying mothers and recent hatchlings that use the glow of the ocean to guide them back to the sea.

Aside from concerns over the well being of the sea turtles, there is concern also for the remainder of X'Cacel's coastal zone, which contains numerous species of flora and fauna, many of which are protected by international agreements and agencies, such as the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

A web site lobbying for the protection of X'Cacel is available at http://www.turtledisaster.org/. Further information on this affair and on the conservation of sea turtles in general can be found on

http://www.paho.org/english/ped/pedhome.htm

What's on this site?

• An expanded section on the health effects of the El Niño phenomenon in the Americas, including the just-passed PAHO's Pan American Sanitary Conference
  

The Governments of the United Kingdom and Jamaica hosted the Caribbean Marine Biodiversity Workshop in Montego Bay, Jamaica, on 27-29 October 1998. The Workshop participants from throughout the Region discussed lessons learned in the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR) and identified constraints and threats to these efforts. In response to these impediments to biodiversity conservation the Workshop drafted recommendations for future actions and the setting of priorities by the Governments of the WCR. These recommendations are to be forwarded to the next meeting of the Commission on Sustainable Development in early 1999.

One of the major outcomes of the Workshop was the announcement of the imminent ratification of the SPAW Protocol by the Governments of France,

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