Circular ecotourism seen as path to protecting San Pablo’s Seven Lakes

SAN PABLO CITY, Laguna — The protection of San Pablo City’s Seven Lakes and the future of tourism took center stage during an environmental forum at McDonald’s in Del Remedio, where advocates discussed how circular economy principles could be applied to ecotourism to reduce waste, protect freshwater ecosystems and strengthen local communities.

The forum brought together Dr. Nervy Santiago, CEO of Alterna Verde Corporation; Bobby Azores, president of Friends of the Seven Lakes (FSL); members of the media and environmental advocates for a discussion on circular ecotourism for the Seven Lakes. Raquel Capiraz Austria served as resource speaker and presented the concept and its potential application to the city’s lake-based tourism.

Austria explained the circular economy approach, which moves away from the traditional “take, make and dispose” model by keeping materials and resources in use for as long as possible through reduction, reuse, repair, recycling and resource recovery.

Applied to tourism, the concept could include reducing single-use plastics, improving waste segregation and recovery, promoting refill and reuse systems, composting organic waste, improving wastewater management and encouraging tourism establishments to adopt more resource-efficient practices.

The discussion is particularly relevant to San Pablo, whose Seven Lakes provide important ecological, economic and recreational benefits while supporting activities such as aquaculture and tourism.

Scientific research has shown that the lakes face continuing water-quality pressures associated with human activities. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Management by researchers from the University of the Philippines Los Baños found that lakes used for aquaculture had lower dissolved oxygen levels and higher biochemical oxygen demand and chlorophyll-a concentrations, conditions associated with eutrophication. The study also found that local communities perceived a link between deteriorating water quality and the expansion of fish cages and settlements around the lakes.

Eutrophication occurs when excessive nutrients enter a body of water, encouraging the growth of algae and aquatic plants. When this organic material decomposes, microorganisms consume dissolved oxygen, potentially reducing oxygen available to fish and other aquatic organisms. Managing nutrient inputs and maintaining adequate dissolved oxygen are therefore important to the long-term health of lakes used for fisheries and tourism.

The Department of Science and Technology’s Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development has also highlighted the importance of continued water-quality monitoring in the Seven Lakes. The agency reported that environmental changes associated with climate change and human activities are affecting the lakes and emphasized the need for assessment and monitoring to help communities dependent on their ecosystem services.

Governance and management remain another challenge. A 2023 study published in Lakes & Reservoirs: Research and Management found that while the San Pablo City government and the Laguna Lake Development Authority had improved conditions in some of the lakes, significant challenges remained. The study noted varying conditions among the Seven Lakes and identified continuing needs in tourism development, fisheries regulation and financial support for lake management.

These findings underscore why tourism development cannot be separated from watershed protection and water-quality management. Waste, untreated wastewater and excessive nutrient inputs can affect freshwater ecosystems, particularly where communities, tourism activities and aquaculture operate around the same water resources.

A circular ecotourism model seeks to address some of these pressures by treating waste and other discarded materials as resources that can potentially be recovered, reused, recycled or converted into useful products. For tourism establishments, this can translate into lower material consumption, better waste management and potentially new livelihood opportunities for local communities.

The participation of Alterna Verde also brought the issue of waste recovery into the discussion. The company operates a Sustainable Environmental Resource Re-genesis System, or SERRS, facility in San Pablo that it describes as an integrated waste management and resource recovery system using processes such as anaerobic digestion to convert organic waste into biogas and organic fertilizer.

Alterna Verde has also been involved in the Biosfair Project, a waste-to-energy pilot launched in San Pablo in April 2026 in partnership with Reurasia Management Corporation and German climate organization atmosfair gGmbH. According to the project partners, the initiative will use modular anaerobic digestion to process municipal organic waste into renewable electricity and organic fertilizer. The facility is expected to process about 1,200 tons of organic waste annually once commissioned.

The forum also comes amid continuing discussions about waste management and watershed protection in San Pablo. Friends of the Seven Lakes and Alterna Verde previously held a consultation addressing waste management and watershed concerns, including questions about the location of the waste facility and potential environmental risks. In that discussion, Santiago explained the facility’s location and the elevation relationship between the site and the Malabanban watershed.

For FSL, the protection of the Seven Lakes extends beyond preserving their scenic value as tourism destinations. The lakes are interconnected with surrounding communities and watersheds, making responsible land use, waste management, water-quality protection and sustainable economic activities essential to their long-term conservation.

The forum highlighted the possibility of making tourism part of that conservation effort rather than treating environmental protection and tourism development as separate objectives.

Under a circular ecotourism approach, visitors, tourism operators, local businesses and communities can participate in reducing waste, conserving water and other resources, and ensuring that economic activity around the lakes does not undermine the ecosystems on which tourism itself depends.

For San Pablo, where the Seven Lakes are central to the city’s identity, the challenge is not simply how to attract more visitors. It is how to ensure that tourism remains compatible with the ecological health of the lakes for generations to come.

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