My feature for Australia and New Zealand magazine on eco-volunteering in the Antipodes is in stores now….

Thanks to Biosphere Expeditions, Conservation Volunteers, Reef Check Australia and everyone else who helped out!

Click here to read it as a PDF

There are several wildlife-identifying ones which might have come in handy on my Big Garden Birdwatch a few weeks back. There’s one called Pollution which tells you how badly the air around you right now is polluted. Adam also recommends GoodGuide – a buyer’s guide along the lines of Ethical Consumer. You can even scan in barcodes while you’re shopping to find out a product’s environmental and social credentials but I’ve scanned everything in my kitchen cupboards to no avail – it’s very US-centric at the moment.

However the app I got most excited about was a free-of-charge app called Skeptical Science. It arms you with a whole list of climate change sceptics’ arguments – and the scientific rebuttal of them. There are 28 arguments under the subheading ‘It’s Not Happening’; 54 under ‘It’s Not Us’; and 6 under ‘It’s Not Bad’.

I wish I’d had this app a couple of weeks back when my friend Dave came round for dinner. He befuddled me with talk of ’sunspots’ being the possible cause of global warming as opposed to CO2 emissions. I knew this couldn’t be right but I hadn’t read much about this particular argument so I didn’t have much of a come-back.

But with a few taps on my iPhone, this new app gives me a link to the sceptics’ argument in action (in this case, a BBC story  on the sun being hotter now than it has been for the last 1,000 years), and then the scientific counter-argument, a lovely graph, and a whole list of studies and experts which refute the sunspot theory.

Simples!

Hotel Rafayel is not an eco-hotel in the log-cabin/treehouse sense of the word. It’s a five star hotel with all the trappings – a spa, a gym, a steam room. Even its own patisserie, MyChelle’s Baketique, with a tantalising display of freshly-frosted cupcakes.

But the hotel does have at its heart a commitment to minimising its carbon footprint and the amount of waste it produces. High-tech heating and ventilation means heat generated in one part of the hotel is transferred to other parts that need heating. The hotel collects rainwater on the rooftop to water all the plants and flush the toilets. And, according to the hotel, its advanced LED lighting system uses up to 80% less energy than standard energy-efficient halogen bulbs.

Though a little dark (a consequence of the lighting), I really liked the bedrooms: plenty of space, stylish artwork and floor-to-ceiling windows, though my view of Halfords was not as inspiring as that from rooms on the other side of the building. The super-comfy beds are made by a company with a zero-carbon footprint and, instead of disposable miniature toiletries in the bathrooms there are large, refilled bottles of organic, vegan, products. The hotel intends for no waste to come out of guest bedrooms at all.

Lots of eco-positives, then, but also a few negatives. Dinner at the restaurant, Banyan On the Thames, was fantastic but I was disappointed not to see a commitment to locally-sourced produce. My Cromer crab was delicious but the mango with which it was served had no doubt jetted half-way round the world to join it. Ditto the fresh fruits at breakfast in the morning. An on-site florist, which flies in fresh flowers from Holland once a week, also sits uneasily with an environmentally-conscious ethos. Neither can you escape the fact that Hotel Rafayel is right next door to London Heliport, and the hotel is openly expecting guests to arrive by helicopter. The hotel is a 10-minute walk from Clapham Junction train station but there was little to persuade guests to walk instead of using the free car transfer available.

There are several ways in which this hotel could boost its eco-credentials further, and its mirrored bathrooms and 32-inch TVs won’t satisfy every green traveller. But if you’re looking for a hotel in London where energy consumption and waste are really taken seriously – and where the cupcakes are to die for – then Hotel Rafayel is a pretty good bet.

See the hotel’s website for prices.

I made a little spread of seeds and over-ripe fruit out on her wall but the birds didn’t exactly flock to it. They need more than 20 minutes notice that the food is out, I imagine.
We were visited by a handful of winged things though – two small brown birds which I identified as wrens, and two which were definitely blackbirds.

A lovely goose flew over too, perhaps from the reservoir in Hackney, but as it didn’t land in the garden I couldn’t count it.
I’m looking forward to hearing the countrywide results in a couple of weeks.
Inspired by the BGBW, I invested in a seed-and-lard feeder which I put out on our balcony last Sunday….it hasn’t had any visitors yet to my knowledge but hopefully word will get out soon. I’m also wondering about investing in a pair of binoculars as it really was a nightmare trying to identify the few birds I did see…

Down on Pond 10, we mostly kept the telescopes trained on a heron, and four cormorants sitting one on each corner of a jetty in the middle of the pond. There were also heaps of coots which spent most of the day having wing-flapping fights and trying to drown each other – hilarious to watch.

Over the course of the weekend, all the species spotted by the team or the public were recorded on a whiteboard, and we clocked up a massive list, including tufted ducks, ring-necked parakeets, gulls, tits, moorhens and even a red kite.

Hamish also found a tiny freshwater crayfish at the edge of the pond – an invasive species rather than a native one sadly but interesting nonetheless.

Up in the tent, we talked to people about becoming a member and about next weekend’s Big Garden Birdwatch.

I was in charge of the craft activity – making bird-feeders from apples, sunflower seeds and a piece of string which went down very well with the kids (and a few adults determined to have a go.)

Jess and Lyndon recruited a rather splendid six new members, and lots of people stopped to chat – including one familiar looking guy who we later confirmed as singer David Gray! A big bird fan it seems.

We also had a possible sighting of author Martin Amis but he didn’t slow down long enough for a positive identification…..

Locals told us if we’d been a bit earlier we might have seen the legendary Bill Oddie, who lives nearby and is often out on the Heath in the morning by all accounts.

A brilliant way to spend my Sunday – can’t wait for the Big Garden Birdwatch now!

Hope you’ve got your hour set aside to see what you can see in your own garden or local park….

Final stats for my day on the Heath:

• Herons: 1
• Cormorants: 4
• Celebrities: 1 (possibly 2)
• Chocolate Biscuits: approx 18 (half a large packet of choc digestives)

CEO Guido Bauer revealed the difference that a Green Globe certificate can make to a hotel’s bottom line: having the certificate lets hotels increase their room rates by 3-7%, reduces their operating costs by 3-11%, and adds 1-3% to the property’s value.

It’s great that they have proof of the financial benefit – in a cash-strapped economy like the Caribbean, a financial incentive for greening your business is particularly necessary.

I’m a little sceptical about such certification schemes though. Firstly, Green Globes are like several other schemes in that hotels pay to join the organisation which can’t fail to at least slightly compromise their impartiality.

Secondly, a hotel does not need to meet all or even most of the list of criteria in order to pass: they must satisfy just 51%. Some of the criteria are extremely difficult to satisfy (the newest criteria is PVC-free room keys) but you’ve got to ask – what about the other 49%?

I also had trouble with Guido’s comments that Caribbean countries are the most advanced region in the world in terms of sustainability, ahead of nearest contenders New Zealand / Australia / France.

Having stayed in countless hotels in the Caribbean which do not recycle, which turn the air-con on in my room while I’m not there, and which fly in food and beverages from around the world, I found this hard to believe.

Doubly hard after the lecture I attended in December in which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb told us that outside Europe and North America, 80% of sewage enters the coastal ocean untreated – including in the Caribbean. Tourism is by far the biggest industry in the Caribbean so if 80% of its sewage is untreated, some of this must surely be coming from the hotels. Hardly sustainable!

I put this to Guido Bauer but he said he won’t accept that this is the case with the Caribbean…. I’m going to see if Kristian can point me in the direction of some further info.

In many ways, I think aquaculture sounds like a sensible idea.

• Natural fish stocks around the world are now dangerously low because of overfishing. By farming fish in giant tanks, we can reduce the pressure on natural stocks while ensuring man’s food supply.

• As the fish nutritionist in this story points out, farmed fish on a controlled diet are free of the mercury and other contaminants found in fish taken from the sea.

• The story also suggets fish-farmers can charge more for farmed fish as they are more standardised in size, and the fish can reach the plate much faster (catching them really is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel…).

• Researchers are also trying to make the practise sustainable, by using waste-water to feel algae, which feeds plankton, which in turn feeds the fish.

But I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about aquaculture – or at least, in the form in which it is described here.

• The description of how the fish eggs are extracted is pretty gross in itself: “Flounder specialist Troy Rezek demonstrated “strip-spawning” on an anesthetized female, harvesting her eggs by pressing them out in a fluid-looking stream.“

• The fish might be free of mercury, but you can bet they require a lot of antibiotics and other medication because they’re kept in such close proximity.

• The story also says that a local company is now “air-expressing” fillets from North Carolina to other major cities in the US. A model built on air-freighting can hardly be the way forward – we’d certainly need to investigate inland fish farms as opposed to flying it inland from the coast.

• The journalist says that, because commercial fishmeal is expensive, the research centre has been experimenting with substitute protein sources such as soybeans. Considering the massive Amazon deforestation that is already taking place to make way for soya plantations, developing yet another industry which depends upon it does not sound good.

That said, the fish do have to be fed on something, and soya would be preferable to smaller fish being taken from the ocean to feed them – a practise which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb mentioned in his lecture in December.

I didn’t have a clue how big the global aquaculture industry is, but when I looked into it, I realised it’s huge:  WWF says almost half the seafood we eat have been artificially farmed, and that aquaculture is the fastest growing food industry in the world.

SeaWeb and WWF are extremely concerned about damaging aquaculture practises – but I see that both organisations are currently helping set up the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) – a new body expected to be in operation by 2011. Furthermore, new global standards for the farming of tilapia were released just a few weeks ago, with several other species guidelines to come, so I’m hopeful that aquaculture will develop in a responsible and sustainable way in the future.

In the afternoon, we heard about big cat conservation Tessa McGregor, who heads up Biosphere’s snow leopard project in the stunning Altai Mountains of Central Asia. We also heard from Chris Gerrard of the Wildlife Trust who set up the Great Fen Project in Cambridgeshire (see my Greentraveller.co.uk blog on that one).

But the morning concentrated on marine conservation, starting with a lecture by Kristian Teleki, one of the vice presidents at SeaWeb, and not-for-profit communications organisation which educates and engages the public on the threats facing the ocean.

Some of the facts with which he began his presentation were a horrifying recap:

• The area of the seafloor dredged each year is 150 times the area of forest cut down worldwide
• 90% of all the ocean’s big fish are gone
• Outside Europe and North America, 80% of sewage enters the coastal ocean untreated – and that includes the Caribbean

As well as the issues of over-fishing, pollution and warming of the ocean by climate change, Kristian also told us a lot about what he termed the ‘souring’ of the ocean. The increasing acidity of the ocean does not get as much coverage as the increasing temperature, and I certainly didn’t know much about it myself. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but it forms a mild carbonic acid when it does so, making it harder for corals, shellfish, and anything else that forms calcium, to calcify. By 2100, 70% of our deep sea corals might be in acidic water. If the pH of the ocean drops to pH 7.3, half of all the mussels in the ocean will die. If it reaches pH 7, there will be 100% mortality of scallops.

But the most interesting thing I took away from Kristian’s presentation was his emphasis on needing to understand human behaviour in order to achieve anything in conservation.

One of SeaWeb’s key aims is to help get the right message out. He said the doom-and-gloom coverage that the mainstream media give to conservation issues is hugely counter-productive:

“Bad headlines make our job harder. The average person on the street thinks, why should I give my money?…Stories that the reefs will be dead by 2020, dead by 2040 – how are we possibly going to sell this to governments when they think we should be putting our money towards something else?”

Armageddon-style headlines about the future of our planet definitely make me sit up and take notice. Personally, they make me all the more determined to try to do my bit. But I can see how for others it could cement a notion that there’s no point trying.

I don’t think that Kristian means the media should be telling only ‘good news stories’ about conservation. Rather, we should be framing all the bad news with more positive messages about what has been and can be achieved when everyone works together.

The massive expansion of tourism over the last 40 years has led to the rapid decline in the quality of the reef.

Coral everywhere faces the threat of bleaching because water is getting warmer because of climate change. But in highly-developed Cancun, pollution by sewage and chemicals and overfishing mean the coral in this region is dying faster than anywhere else.

The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network says the amount of reef surface covered by live coral in the Caribbean has fallen about 80% in the past 30 years. In the Pacific, between Hawaii and Indonesia, meanwhile, reefs have been losing about 1% of their coral coverage annually over the past 25 years. eTurboNews spoke to Cancun dive instructors who said they were worried they might not have a job for much longer.

Cancun knew it needed to address the problem, but the country desperately needs its tourist dollars, and Cancun couldn’t turn divers and snorkellers away.

By building the underwater museum – which in effect becomes an artificial reef – there is something new for divers and snorkellers to explore, and the existing coral reef is given chance to recover from years of damage. I doubt it’ll ever get back to its original condition but coral will colonise the inert concrete of the sculptures, creating new coral coverage.

I must admit, the thought of an ‘underwater museum’ didn’t really float my boat at first – I dive to see wildlife, not for cultural enrichment.

But when I checked out the website of Jason de Caires Taylor, the British artist behind the project, I really warmed to the  idea.

‘Museum’ is a bit misleading – it will be more of a sculpture garden, with more than 300 life-size sculptures, such as an army of Mayan warriors, and a ‘dream catcher’ where visitors can leave a message in a bottle. I recognised the photos of his existing project – Taylor built the Underwater Gallery at Moliniere Bay in Grenada.

His description of what it’s like to experience artwork underwater sounds fantastic:

“Underwater and devoid of white walls the viewer is unrestrained in their interaction with the work. Buoyancy and weightlessness enable a detached physical experience, encouraging encounters that are perceptual and personal. As time passes and the works change, they reshape and redefine the underwater landscape in unpredictable ways.”

And the sculptures that have been submerged for some time, now covered in coral polyps and other growth, are really stunning.

Sinking a load of concrete statues is not going to solve the massive and complex threats that coral reefs around the world face but the Underwater Museum does seem like an exciting and innovative step in the right direction.

We managed not to get run over by the marauding motorbikes (no mean feat), and also managed to snatch our wrists back from the henna-wielding women before they could begin a tattoo on us.

We enjoyed delicious tagines at Restaurant Marrekchi overlooking Djemaa el-Fna; there’s been a religious feast with lots of lamb this weekend, so it’s a great time to here (unless, of course, you’re a lamb).

We did get conned into spending 20 quid on dried figs and dates (albeit very tasty ones) by a street vendor who I suspect was willfully misunderstanding my A-level French.

But by far the most distressing part of the day was seeing captive monkeys being forced to sit on tourists’ heads and shoulders for photographs.

Just seeing the monkeys yanked around by their wrists on a lead, and the tiny cage in which they were all crammed, was upsetting enough. But when one monkey was taken out of the cage, distressed and angry, it started jumping at and biting its keeper. The keeper took out a length of thick rope and beat the monkey with it, then slapped the animal around the head. I felt sick.

The shrieking monkey went completely silent, so I imagine that it had been hit with a sizable amount of force.

Monkeys weren’t the only unfortunates in the square – we also saw a pigeon which, whether drugged or injured, seemed unable to fly away, and a hedgehog on a leash. Then of course there’s all the snakes…

I understand that different cultures treat animals in different ways, but I’m sure I’m not the only visiting tourist who finds such animal abuse completely abhorrent. It’s certainly been enough to taint my view of Marrakesh.

I think the tourist board should push for the use of live animals by entertainers in the square to be banned altogether – the games, stalls, music and magic of Djemaa el-Fna are more than enough of an attraction without this outdated and cruel sort of entertainment.