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Billionaire Pays Population To Keep Its Island Beautiful

Mark Shuttleworth, a tech billionaire, is doling out payments to the entire population of the African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe for keeping it beautiful.


A beach on São Tomé and Príncipe

Finding a pristine tropical paradise that’s also accessible to tourists is difficult in the modern era. And this particular island is located in the Gulf of Guinea, about 500 miles south of Nigeria and about 300 miles west of Gabon.


Shuttleworth hopes that São Tomé and Príncipe will not only keep the island pristine but also create a sustainable economic ecosystem that doesn’t ruin what made him fall in love with the place. It's certainly a controversial model that could roll back encroaching development at vacation hotspots all over the world. Would that be a bad thing?


Shuttleworth, the CEO of software company Canonical, has already purchased and is currently renovating four hotels on the 55-square-mile island, and wants to make sure his investment pays off for centuries to come. So, says Bloomberg, he is working with the government and the opposition political parties to create a unified program that pays the island’s 8,500 residents a quarterly sum to maintain the unique ecological value of their surroundings. It could be described as a radical plan to transform ecotourism.


The program, dubbed the “Natural Dividend,” will start sometime next year, with the payments fluctuating each quarter based on the environmental impact created by development on the island. So far it’s a bit vague how they plan to measure that, but they’ve been taking a detailed census, deploying drones to scan the environment, and conducting research.


Shuttleworth understands that his critics will smear this plan as an outsider creating a techno state that trades money for surveillance and data (fair), but he counters that it’s also underwriting the preservation of a healthy natural ecosystem that makes every citizen a paid stakeholder (also fair). Its success may hinge on how fully booked those hotels are over the coming years.

 

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