Climate, Construction Eroding Cancun’s Beaches

Climate, Construction Eroding Cancun’s Beaches
by Mark Stevenson

Cancun’s eroding white sand beaches are providing a note of urgency to the United Nations climate talks being held just south of this seaside resort famed for its postcard-perfect vistas. Rising sea levels and a series of unusually powerful hurricanes have aggravated the folly of building a tourist destination atop shifting sand dunes on a narrow peninsula. After the big storms hit, the bad ideas were laid bare: Much of Cancun’s glittering hotel strip is now without a beach.

Hotels built too tall, too heavy and too close to the shore, as well as beaches stripped of native vegetation to make them more tourist-friendly, have contributed to the massive erosion. Cancun’s beaches largely disappeared after Category 4 Hurricane Wilma hit in 2005, leaving waves lapping against hotel foundations or against rocks.

Four category 4 and 5 hurricanes have hit Mexico in the past decade, the highest rate in 40 years and equal to all those in the preceding three decades, according to Mexico’s National Meteorological Service. Many scientists blame such extreme weather patterns on climate change.

In a major restoration project last year, millions of cubic yards (meters) of sand were dredged from the sandy bottom of the Caribbean and pumped ashore in Cancun. The project created a seven-mile stretch of beach some 40 to 70 yards (meters) wide, at a cost of about $70 million.

It is already washing away. Waves have carved a waist-high shelf into the beach and Assistant Tourism Secretary Hector de la Cruz acknowledges that 6 percent to 8 percent of the new sand has been swept away — even without any major storms.

Experiments are still under way to judge the exact effects, but there is evidence that sea grasses have suffered higher die-offs from previous beach restoration efforts, said Iglesias, who works on coral reefs and coastal environments in Puerto Morelos, just outside Cancun, where the two-week U.N. climate change conference is being held.

Tall hotels force winds downward onto the beach, creating eddies that encourage erosion. Waves that once might have rolled harmlessly right over the dunes now smack into solid hotel foundations, and rebound — filled with sand — back out to sea. And the very weight of big hotels might be pressing the unstable sand peninsula downward.