California Sustainable Tourism Summit in Pacific Grove?

Pacific Grove (aka Butterfly Town) was home to the inaugural California Sustainable Tourism Summit in October 2009, nicely timed with the arrival of monarchs to their winter resort in coastal California. One of the goals of the Summit was to share information and generate ready-to-use ideas on sustainability to be translated into increased tourism dollars. This Summit seemed relatively important for Pacific Grove, like much of California, because they have been in precarious financial straits (even discussing bankruptcy). What is rather shocking is that despite that Pacific Grove draws major tourism in part because of their Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, recent destruction of monarch habitat at the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary likely contributed to the loss of monarchs overwintering there this year.

Clearly, a fraction of the tourism to Pacific Grove is because city officials and the community had the foresight to dub their city as a monarch butterfly overwintering sanctuary, even establishing several legal ordinances to protect the monarch and its habitat  (e.g., City Ordinance No. 352 makes it a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a butterfly, punishable by a $1000 fine). That sort of action drew tourism to Pacific Grove.

What is Needed

The City would be better off investing in ways that would optimize habitat conditions to increase the numbers of monarchs that overwinter in their Sanctuary.  Our understanding of the environmental factors that lead to that are still largely unknown. Even more so, we lack a solid understanding of the specific reasons why monarch numbers fluctuate from site to site and year to year. The better way forward is to form an interdisciplinary team of economists, scientists, tourism experts, NGOs, government entities, and others to 1) determine the relative influences of the environmental determinants, or habitat parameters, that drive monarch fluctuations over spatial and temporal scales, 2) determine conservation and management strategies that will increase numbers of overwintering monarchs, 3) determine how increases in monarchs will translate into tourism dollars, 4) determine ways to market the monarchs and the area as a whole to boost tourism, and 5) adopt an adaptive management framework that continually integrates new information to refine those strategies.