2006-12-09

2007 is the Year of the Dolphins

"The UN Convention on Migratory Species, together with its specialized agreements on dolphin conservation ACCOBAMS and ASCOBANS and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society WDCS have declared 2007 the Year of the Dolphin."

http://www.yod2007.org/

The species guide pages will be very useful when completed:
http://www.yod2007.org/en/World_of_dolphins/Species_guide/index.html

The TUI Group is a major supporter of this initiative and appears to be hosting their web site. TUI appears to be a large German-based conglomerate:
http://www.tui-group.com/en/ir/corporate_governance/supervisory_board/

TUI was called
Preussag until 2002; sstarted as a tourism company and still has a substantial portion of its capital invested in tourism. TUI is diversifying its capital investments yet TUI's tourism activities are still significant, as described on their web site: "... around 79 tour operators throughout Europe handling 18 million customers a year. In addition, the Group has 3500 travel agencies, 37 incoming agencies, seven airlines with more than 100 aircraft (sic), and more than 290 hotels with a total capacity of around 163,000 beds."

TUI states that the environment is the capital of tourism. They appear to have decided to spend on environmental protection and they support
conservation organisations such as Sociedad Española de Cetáceos (Tenerife) cetaceos.com which is involved in whale watching with M.E.E.R. e.V. (La Gomera and Tenerife) which is based in Berlin: www.m-e-e-r.de:
http://www.tui-group.com/en/konzern/tui_umweltmanagement/umw_dest/biodiv/whale.html

TUI recently acquired CP Ships which was originally part of CP Rail, a historical Canadian company.

From the m-e-e-r.de web site, I arrived at this very interesting links page: http://www.oceania.org.au/wwwlinks/dedicated.html

2 Comments:

Blogger corygirl said...

I was excited about this but am concerned about the fact that subsidiary companies of TUI also promotes and sells excursions to swim with captive dolphins, not very 'dolphin friendly' and makes me wonder why they are involved in the Year of the Dolphin? Profiting from facilities that keep dolphins in captivity on the one hand and paying lip service to helping save them on the other - is this not just another case of a large company using the conservation label to clean up their act ?

Mon Dec 11, 06:20:00 AM EST  
Blogger serge said...

I'm concerned too. That's why I posted this.

Sat Mar 03, 12:55:00 PM EST  

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