There’s been such a spike in the number of visitors coming into Canada’s national and provincial parks, that some conservationists are floating the idea of capping how many people can enter them every year.
The idea is nothing new as such places as the Galapagos Islands or Peru's Machu Picchu already restrict the number of tourists.
In Canada, one nature advocate says officials “need to take action” as more park visitors mean more pollution and possibility of destruction.
“There’s no question that Banff (National Park) is practically bursting at the seams,” said Peter Zimmerman, parks program supervisor at Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society on CTV’s Your Morning Monday.
“Common sense tells you that the more people you jam into a park, the more impact you’re going to have — the more garbage, the more wastewater, the greater wildlife interactions (and) the more wildlife mortality you’re going to have.”
Ecologists and conservationists report that visitors’ impact is only getting worse, with Zimmerman pointing out that the problems associated with increasing numbers of visitors has “exponentially” increased.
Approximately 4.18 million people visited Banff National Park last year — eclipsing the crowds flocking to other parks across Canada.
Since 2014, there’s been a 12.4 per cent increase in the number of visitors to Banff National Park, while there has been a nine per cent spike in visits to all national parks, Parks Canada reports.
Zimmerman mentions that Parks Canada is already considering parking restrictions in Sunshine Meadows in Banff National Park and the need for a cap on the number of visitors that are allowed to go in the summer time.
Before restricting visitors, however, Parks Canada has made efforts to reduce visitors’ ecological footprint in some parks by encouraging them to arrive by public transit, for instance.
In anticipation of the crowds during the push for Canada 150, Parks Canada implemented a free shuttle service to Lake Louise from an overflow parking lot five kilometres away.
But Zimmerman says that, so far, such measures are optional and he thinks “we need to be more aggressive in terms of mandating that.”
“Even on a cold, wet September day, the bus was only quarter full at the most, but when we got up to Lake Louise,” he said. “The parking lot was completely full and traffic wardens were turning people around and having them go back down to go to an overflow parking area.”
He said that Canada already restricts the number of people who can visit the backcountry in Banff. Decades ago, he said, Canada implemented a mandatory transit system to get people into areas around Lake O’Hare, British Columbia.
Parks Canada found that 69 per cent of 118 ecosystems in Canada’s 42 national parks were stable with 20 per cent showing improving trends—only 12 per cent of them are described as declining.
But the 2017 data identified that a major factor considered a stressor for Canada’s parks is "over-use of national parks by humans."
