Tell Paul Mathews not to design/build 'eco' ski resorts that disrupt wild Snow Leopards!

A CANADIAN company called "Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners" are planning on cutting native coniferous forest within the Northern Tien Shan National Park... to build a lousy ski resort.

It seems that in Kazakhstan, at least one petition was blocked (by the local authorities & internet service providers), as well as many other sources of information about the demise of Snow Leopards. But word is slowly getting out. Here's an article where campaigners spelled out SOS in the snow.

Delving a little deeper, here's another petition that you can sign to stop further development in this area. That one has 15,086 signatures on it already but it you look there aren't any signatures from Western countries!

In 2002 the Park was included into the list of places in Kazakhstan to be nominated for the status of UNESCO World Heritage

Project Details
According to the feasibility report prepared by Ecosign, 77 ski slopes will be constructed stretching 63 kilometers, with 16 lifts capable of carrying 10,150 skiers at a time. In addition, hotels with a total of 5,736 beds will be built. The goal is to attract a million visitors a year from within a four-hour flight radius of Almaty, spanning areas of India, China and Russia.

Here are some statistics from IUCN concerning the estimated population of Snow Leopards in the wild. The total estimated population [2003 data] is 4080 to 6590 individuals, as follows:
Uzbekistan: 20-50
Tajikistan: 180-220
Kazakhstan: 180-200
Kyrgyzstan: 150-500
Afghanistan: 100-200?
Pakistan: 200-420
Bhutan: 100-200?
Russia: 150-200
Mongolia: 500-1,000
China: 2,000-2,500
Nepal: 300-500
India: 200-600

Project Area (in hectares) 170920,000

Level of Investment (in USD)
750 million (from public funds)
$2.1 Billion in Private investment sought

"How to make a ski resort" [and disrupt some of the few remaining snow leopards in the process]

You may not have heard of Mathews, but he might just be the most influential person in the world of skiing. Since starting his Ecosign firm in 1975, and making the fledgling resort of Whistler in British Columbia his first project, he has designed more than 400 resorts in 39 countries and helped create five Winter Olympic alpine resorts. If you're one of the roughly 115 million regular skiers around the world, it's almost certain that you've skied on a resort conceived at least in part by Mathews and his firm. His gift, he has said, "is seeing things that other people can't see… and not being afraid to tell the truth, even when it's not what my clients want to hear".

"harmonizing with the natural environment"

Ecosign's work stretches from Trysil and Hemsedal in Norway to Zermatt, Laax and Courchevel in the Alps, Niseko in Japan and many of the new resorts in developing countries in Asia and Eastern Europe. They've helped bring skiing to Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Turkmenistan.

"We do it all," says Mathews over the phone from Canada on a Sunday morning. He spends half the year travelling, and can often be found in helicopters ("I've recently been flying round Serbia in military helicopters," he says). He's just back from Tokyo, and is about to head to Switzerland where he'll meet the Beijing bid committee for the 2022 Olympics and show the International Ski Federation (FIS) his latest masterplan, for the Jungfrau-Grindelwald ski areas. He's straight-talking, chipper and happy to share his encyclopaedic knowledge of resorts around the world, even if we're stopping him eating his breakfast.

A keen skier and self-confessed tree-hugger, Mathews studied forest ecology and landscape architecture at the University of Washington in the early 1970s. After spending a winter in Zermatt, Switzerland, he was impressed by being in a resort with no cars, and became fixated on the environmental insensitivity of many American ski resorts. "You'd see bulldozers and power lines, and every family needed three car parking spaces for their trip. There was a brutality and an environmental insensitivity about a lot of the design, or the lack of it."

Behind a lot of the plan was the environment. The pistes Ecosign planned moved with the natural terrain, and straw and seed were planted on the ground to prevent erosion. Mathews hired biologists to inventory the mountain's flora and fauna, and planted trees that mimicked the glading found in nature. He claims to have improved Whistler's ecological integrity tenfold. "It was," he says simply, "about respect for the mountain, and not being a knucklehead. With Whistler, we proved that you can create a big resort sensitively."

That led to more commissions in British Columbia, then Idaho and Washington, before Ecosign latched onto the Japanese ski resort boom, when the country saw nearly 500 resorts in the mid-'80s swell to around 700 by the mid-'90s. By 1989, Mathews had broken Europe with a masterplan for Laax, Switzerland, which involved a few classic pieces of Ecosign resort planning: creating a pedestrian-orientated central village, and merging ski operators to improve efficiency.

While the environment is at the centre of a lot of what Ecosign does, it's also about common sense. When he had a brief to redesign Hemsedal in Norway in 1995, he noticed that "monster traffic jams" formed as people drove to the 10,000 tourist beds in farmhouses scattered around the region. "The ski centre was perched on the side of the mountain. It was all very precarious, so we recommended they build the village at the bottom of the mountain, with centralised parking and new units on the piste." The traffic problems virtually disappeared, and the yearly number of skiers has almost doubled, from around 350,000 to around 680,000.

"Ultimately," says Mathews, "it comes down to making a place you want to spend time in. The most satisfying thing for me is getting a pair of skis on and skiing the pistes like everyone else. That's really what it's all about."

Do you know what I say to that? The best way to maintain forest ecology, is to leave it the fuck alone.

I don't think some ultra-high net worth individuals realise how powerful the internet is these days.

So you claim to be a tree-hugger do you? So why do you still want to go ahead with a project that would displace Snow Leopards when so many people in Kazakhstan have opposed it?

And if it really is so 'eco', why have people been silenced? They even have to resort to writing messages in the snow like this:

The ski resort design, Kok Zhailau, near Almaty received Rusty Nail, an anti-award for the worst example of unsustainable tourism, at the International Tourism Fair ITB 2014 in Berlin, Kazakhstan Ecological Society Green Salvation said.

Kazakhstan: Green Zone on Slippery Slope

A group of flashmobbers took to the slopes in south-eastern Kazakhstan on a crisp March morning this year to spell out a heartfelt SOS with their bodies.

In this case, SOS could have stood for "save our slopes:" the 70 activists who lay down in the snow to form the letters were protesting controversial plans to build a ski resort in an area of pristine natural beauty near the commercial capital, Almaty. Opponents were also calling attention to apparent conflicts of interest that surround the project and raise the potential for corruption.

The dispute over plans to develop the pristine slopes of Kok-Zhaylau ("green summer pasture" in Kazakh) pits the city government and powerful business interests against environmental activists and concerned citizens, who are fighting to preserve a beauty spot inside the Ile-Alatau national park. Despite the official designation, development in protected territory is legally possible in certain cases.

Opponents counter that development will damage the environment and threaten rare flora and fauna. "What is the chief objective of national parks? To preserve biological diversity; preserve forests; preserve water resources; preserve unique types of Red Book flora and fauna which inhabit the territory of the national park?" asked Sergey Kuratov, head of the Green Salvation environmental group. "Or to develop mountain tourism, exhausting water resources; chopping down forests; annihilating rare fauna; destroying glaciers; ruining landscapes?"

The plans – which Kuratov argues contravene national law and international environmental commitments – are not finalized, but are well-advanced. A feasibility study has been conducted by two companies, Canada's Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners (an international leader in ski resort design) and the Kok-Zhaylau firm, founded and owned by Almaty City Hall.

"We're not trying to get rid of the plans for developing a ski resort, for developing the mountains, because […] we would also love our country to develop, but our position is that we call for all kinds of ski resorts to be placed out of the national park," Nursultan Belkhojayev, a member of the Initiative Group of Kok-Zhaylau Protection (an unofficial body with no funding), told EurasiaNet.org.

Developers "are going to change the habitat of the endemic species" in the park, added group member Zhamilya Zhukenova. This includes the endangered snow leopard – a symbol of both Kazakhstan and the city of Almaty.
According to an open letter to President Nursultan Nazarbayev against the project signed by over 8,000 people, the area is home to 811 types of flora (including 17 listed as endangered by Kazakhstan) and 1,700 types of fauna.

Officials at Kazakhstan's Environmental Protection Ministry told EurasiaNet.org it has no jurisdiction over Almaty's municipal government. City Hall's Tourism Directorate rejected environmental "misgivings" as "verbal assertions without the presentation of any proof," it told EurasiaNet.org in a written response to a query about the issue. There will be solid environmental safeguards, it added, and international experience will be considered "to reduce to a minimum the impact on the environment."

The Kok-Zhaylau firm said it was attentive to environmental concerns, but studies had shown that the area selected has the best climatic and geographical conditions for the resort. "We are hearing and listening to public misgivings," it told EurasiaNet.org in writing. "This is a normal process – the exchange of opinions with society."

The company said it was preparing to conduct environmental field research, "so at this point public misgivings about the resort's negative impact on the environment are not supported by facts – the results of ecological studies."

Zhulamanov has pledged that if research finds that the project will seriously damage the environment, it will be abandoned. He has promised to replant more trees than will be chopped down, and install webcams for real-time public monitoring of construction.

City Hall also is dismissive of concerns about the potential for corruption and cost-overruns, saying that the close scrutiny to which the project is subject guarantees transparency. There is big money involved: as currently envisioned, the state will invest $700 million in infrastructure and seek $2.1 billion in private investment.

Misgivings have also been voiced about potential conflicts of interest. According to a report published in the Alau monthly last September, Zhulamanov, the official propelling the project forward, is a long-time associate of Serzhan Zhumashev, the chairman of Capital Partners, which has built several major infrastructure projects around Almaty, including reconstructing the Shymbulak ski resort. Capital Partners managing director Aleksandr Guzhavin stepped down to head the new Kok-Zhaylau company founded by City Hall.

Capital Partners did not respond to requests for comment, and in its written response city hall did not answer a question about potential conflicts of interest. The Kok-Zhaylau firm rejected the idea as unfounded in any "official information."

It's claimed that:

Residents of Kazakhstan live in conditions of dictatorship, terrible corruption and the state lawlessness. Many freedoms, as well as freedom of expression of own opinion are inaccessible to mere mortals. The sites of petitions are blocked by intelligence services also as well as the free independent press. But we don't despond! The training is longer, the steel becomes stronger... :))))

The project is supported by the ministry of environmental protection and the president Nazarbayev. At the same time civil activists have organized the civil movement "Protect Kok-Zhailau".

On January 11, 2013 the Alma-Ata municipality carried out formal public hearings about the resort. The official read the report, and didn't allow the public to express their opinion, referring to regulations. The public was thus debarred from decision-making process.

Activists sent an open letter to President Nursultan Nazarbayev against the project signed by over 10,000 people about the need for intervention in the illegal actions of regional officials and the ministries. However, they have received no response. Various actions of the public in protest were held, with no reaction from the state. Mass media, trying to publish information on the harmful aspects of the project, received summons and were even closed. But the petition and resistance still keeps growing.

Links:

• http://k-zh.kz/?page_id=1254
  
• http://www.greensalvation.org/en/
• http://www.ejolt.org/2014/06/welcome-to-the-worst-tourism-project-in-the-world/
• https://ejatlas.org/conflict/protect-kok-zhailau-ile-alatau-state-national-nature-park-kazakhstan
• https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Spasyom_Snezhnogo_Barsa/?pv=92
• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1t5sASJYXQMuSZyWtUBy0aNMEm1ICcSqeSSPhmRr4Stk/viewform
• https://prezi.com/vtqb5qqs8xyo/save-kok-zhaylau/
• http://aarhusclearinghouse.unece.org/news/1000787/?year=2014
• http://respublika-kz.info/news/society/37713/
• http://esgrs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/list-15-086-4.01.2016.pdf
• http://www.ecosign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Ecosign-Brochure.pdf
• http://www.ecosign.com/home/