Management requirements for tourist landing sites in the maritime Antarctic and a model plan for Deception Island, South Shetland Islands

Increasing tourist visits to the Maritime Antarctic potentially threaten to damage scientific research, and the environment of landing sites. The current obligatory and hortatory requirements have been developed to control activities of tourists, and not to manage the land they use. This protection is insufficient to mitigate such latent problems. This thesis investigates the Antarctic Treaty System (A TS), in particular the Madrid Protocol of 1991 (Protocol), to elucidate the requirements desirable to manage individual landing sites. The Area Protection and Management System of Annex V of the Protocol provides for two designations, Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA) and Antarctic Specially Protected Area (ASPA), which could be a method to achieve this. The ASMA was identified as the more appropriate method. Annex V requires a management plan for an ASMA. Plans from six other wilderness areas are evaluated to determine common criteria that are essential for management. The requirements for an ASMA contain all of these criteria, except those pertaining to enforcement by a sovereign authority. Without provisions for enforcement, an ASMA could not be considered as effective as plans elsewhere in the world. However, when sufficient information is provided to a tour operator the enforcement provided by self-regulation at tourist-landing sites has generally proven to be effective. A management plan is developed in compliance with the regulatory and hortatory requirements and by implementing the criteria determined essential in this study. Three areas of Deception Island are used as a case study to demonstrate that an effective management plan for tourist landing sites can be drafted. Furthermore, the format developed in this study should be considered as a model for future ASMA management plans.Digitisation of this thesis was sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin