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Tourism & Remote WorkSeptember 3, 2026

Can The 2027 Indian Ocean Games Transform Tourism in Comoros?

The Comoros Islands have long possessed the ingredients of an Indian Ocean tourism success story: volcanic landscapes, largely undeveloped beaches, coral-rich waters, a distinctive blend of African, Arab and French influences, and a location between East Africa, Madagascar and the established island destinations of Mauritius, Seychelles and Réunion. What Comoros has lacked is not tourism potential, but the infrastructure, connectivity, investment pipeline and international visibility required to convert that potential into a functioning visitor economy. The 2027 Indian Ocean Island Games, known by the French acronym JIOI, could become a rare opportunity to change that trajectory. Yet the Games will only produce a lasting tourism dividend if the accommodation, transport and sporting investments being planned are designed for commercial use long after the athletes have returned home. At the center of one proposed legacy project is Faouzia Vitry, a former Réunion regional political figure with extensive experience in Indian Ocean cooperation. Information provided to eTurboNews says Vitry has been appointed to lead a special-purpose company responsible for developing an accommodation village for the Games. The proposed development would include approximately 200 villas used to house participants during the sporting event before being converted into permanent residential or tourism accommodation. The plan is ambitious. It could provide Comoros with desperately needed room capacity and create an investable real-estate product for Comorians, the diaspora and regional partners. It could also become an expensive post-event liability unless ownership, utilities, management, access and market demand are settled before construction begins. Independent public documentation confirming the SPV’s complete financing structure, construction timetable and final commercial model remains limited. These details will be essential in judging whether the village is a bankable tourism development or primarily a Games-related accommodation solution. Faouzia Vitry Returns to Indian Ocean Regionalism Vitry’s appointment would reconnect several strands of Indian Ocean tourism history. In 2016, she represented Réunion at the Carnaval International de Victoria in Seychelles, an event associated with former Seychelles tourism minister Alain St. Ange and designed to bring cultures and tourism destinations together through a highly visible international carnival. At that time, Réunion and Comoros were both associated with the Vanilla Islands regional tourism initiative, which sought to market the Indian Ocean islands collectively rather than as isolated destinations. Vitry later served as a vice president of the Regional Council of Réunion. Regional documents identify her as having held responsibilities connected with education, youth, the Vanilla Islands and regional affairs. According to the information supplied to eTurboNews, she also managed regional cooperation programs with a budget of approximately €64 million and served in municipal and community positions in Saint-Denis. Her move to Comoros is therefore more than a conventional property appointment. It signals an attempt to bring regional political experience, institutional knowledge and diaspora engagement into a project that Comoros hopes will survive beyond 2027. eTurboNews contacted Alain St. Ange, who described the proposed Games village as an opportunity to bring Comoros more visibly onto the tourism map. His broader argument is familiar across the Indian Ocean: major events are most valuable when they leave usable hotel rooms, transport links, public spaces and international awareness rather than empty structures. What Are the Indian Ocean Island Games? The Indian Ocean Island Games are a regional multi-sport competition involving Comoros, Madagascar, Maldives, Mauritius, Mayotte, Réunion and Seychelles. The event was created to promote sporting competition, friendship and cooperation among the islands and is generally held every four years. Comoros is scheduled to host the 12th edition in Moroni in 2027. Recent regional reporting says 18 sporting disciplines have been approved, with the Games expected to run from August 24 into early September. The program includes athletics, swimming, football, basketball, handball, judo, karate, volleyball, table tennis, tennis, pétanque and para-sport events. Hosting the Games is significant for Comoros because the country has never before had to provide accommodation, sporting facilities, transportation and event services at this scale. A regional inspection has already raised the issue of slow infrastructure progress. That does not mean the Games cannot be delivered, but it compresses the time available for procurement, construction, testing and operational training. The event could attract several thousand athletes, officials, media representatives, contractors and supporters. Even if the direct visitor volume is modest by global mega-event standards, it would represent a substantial demand shock for a destination whose tourism economy remains small. Comoros Has the Product, but Not Yet the Tourism System Comoros consists principally of Grande Comore, Anjouan and Mohéli, while Mayotte is administered by France and remains politically disputed. Grande Comore offers the capital, Moroni, the active Mount Karthala volcano, lava landscapes, traditional towns and beaches framed by black volcanic rock. Anjouan is greener and more mountainous, with historic settlements, waterfalls and agricultural landscapes. Mohéli has perhaps the strongest ecotourism proposition, including marine biodiversity, nesting sea turtles, whales and community-based conservation. The country’s tourism potential has been recognized for years. A World Bank tourism review identified nature, culture and marine assets but also highlighted weak infrastructure, limited skills, poor destination management and inadequate connectivity as major barriers. The numbers demonstrate how far Comoros remains from its Indian Ocean competitors. Central-bank data cited by Trading Economics indicate 21,718 tourist arrivals in 2024, compared with 20,297 in 2023. Even allowing for differences in statistical methods, this is a fraction of the annual traffic handled by Mauritius, Seychelles or nearby Zanzibar. Low visitor numbers are not necessarily a weakness. They give Comoros a chance to avoid the high-density resort model and position itself around nature, culture, community tourism and small-scale luxury. But exclusivity by itself is not a tourism strategy. Travelers still need reliable flights, functioning roads, quality accommodation, trained guides, safe boats, medical support, electricity, water, telecommunications and predictable booking channels. The United States’ travel guidance states that formal tourism infrastructure is limited and warns that emergency response and medical treatment capacity are inadequate. Canada similarly advises travelers to exercise a high degree of caution because of limited emergency and medical services. Those warnings are commercially important. International tour operators, insurers, corporate travel departments and event organizers consider medical evacuation, emergency planning and duty-of-care standards before placing clients in a destination.

Culture & CommunitySeptember 3, 2026

The Extinction of Languages Is an Environmental Issue

More than 2,000 Indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing this century — and with them we could lose vitally important traditional ecological knowledge. Environmentalists, myself included, pay close attention to gloomy topics like species extinctions and Earth’s dwindling life-support systems. It’s not for the love of dark matters that we keep tabs on depressing metrics. Rather, it’s with the hope that they teach us something and guide us toward mitigating future losses. On the biological front, about a million species could be taken by an extinction vortex by the end of the century. That’s also when linguists estimate about one-third of the world’s 7,000-plus Indigenous languages will go silent — and with them, most of their related cultures. This is not uplifting news, to be sure. Nonetheless, people concerned with environmental protection can learn a lot from language extinctions. As it turns out, the survival of languages and species may well be linked. And when we wrap our minds around this, the panorama for conservation actually gets a little brighter. A Confluence of Curious Similarities Linguistic variation around the world caught the imagination and attention of naturalists going back at least to the Victorian era of exploration, when folks like Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin traveled across the wilds of South America and the Malay Archipelago. Wallace marveled at the linguistic diversity shown by communities spread along the edges of the watery world in the Amazon basin and dotting the highlands of New Guinea. He even wrote out partial lexicons to aid in communicating with his guides. Darwin, in his ruminations on the descent of man, went so far as to remark that languages and species are “curiously the same.” He was thinking about human evolution and wondering if languages might evolve by natural selection. With his thoughts on the flowering of languages, he did not give time to their senescence. It would take more than 100 years, after the concurrent publication of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection, for scientists to uncover the full extent of global linguistic variation, and also the languages’ risk of extinction. Today the patterns emerging from these discoveries hold lessons for environmentalists. One of the pioneering explorations was conducted by Larry Gorenflo (Penn State University) and his team of conservation biologists and linguists. Their labors produced some profound findings. First off, the places on Earth with outrageously high numbers of species also have outrageously high numbers of Indigenous languages. Furthermore, many of the species and languages of these hyper-rich spots are endemic. They don’t occur, much less co-occur, anywhere else. Gorenflo and team went on to examine language diversity in regions that conservationists designate as “priority areas.” A second striking fact emerged: High-priority conservation regions are home to nearly 70% of the world’s languages. These results demonstrate we can either win big or lose big, depending on the success of our efforts in these doubly diverse hotspots. It’s like playing a Daily Double, with “How to save life on Earth?” as the question to the answer. Lullaby for Language Extinction is forever. Except when it’s not. This isn’t a reference to de-extinction and the facsimiles brought into existence by technology. It’s about languages. When the last speaker of a language falls into eternal slumber, so does their language. Linguists say that such languages are “dormant.” Dormancy is different from the extinction of biological species, at least in principle. Sleeping languages can, hypothetically, experience reawakening. That is, they can be spoken again after a period of dormancy, but only under special circumstances. At a minimum there must be a written record of the lexicon and syntax. For instance, Hebrew came back in the 19th century after a long slumber. Sadly, however, the vast majority of Indigenous languages only exist in the oral form, making linguistic resurrections nearly impossible. This is why dormancy and extinction are, for all intents and purposes, synonymous. It’s also why we must work to document and teach Indigenous languages before they nod off. High Tolls for Both Languages and Species Just as the vastness of language varieties was unearthed, the global decline became apparent as well. Nowadays researchers race to figure out what drives language endangerment. Lindell Bromham and Xia Hua (Australian National University) are two such investigators, who lead a large interdisciplinary team analyzing the subject. In a recent cutting-edge study of massive scope and scale, the team uncovered the principal determinants that drive the downturn. One of the top three is strangely simple: roads. “Greater road density, which may encourage population movement, is associated with increased (language) endangerment,” Bromham and team conclude. You might say that roads compromise the linguistic intactness of a landscape. Conservation biologists, well versed in the dangers that roads pose to natural ecosystems, should relate to that. This is not to suggest that road effects are perfectly analogous in their impacts on languages and species. There are major differences. They have to do with the paradoxical capacity of roads to both create and destroy connections. For remote ethnolinguistic groups, a frontier highway increases connectivity. Distances that once required weeks or more to cross may be traversed in hours or days. Lines of communication suddenly open — for material goods, of course, but also for the transmission of diverse ideologies and ways of life. When this happens with high speed or without guardrails, a collision with cultural traditions and language preservation ensues. Often, such roads are the handiwork of large industries, looking to make money in the frontier, usually at the expense of local peoples whose lands they usurp. One of the first casualties of enhanced contact is the local vernacular. This is a big blow to culture, potentially harming people’s health, wellbeing, and identity. The loss is accompanied by a shift to another language, usually the parlance of government, business, and education. A new sociocultural reality arises as the highway expansion continues. By contrast, roads harm ecosystems by severing connections. Effectively, highways fracture natural populations and break the fundamental rules of ecology. Renowned ecologist and conservation biologist Dr. William Laurance (James Cook University) tells me that bulldozing through forest expanses is like opening Pandora’s box. “It’s because of the transformative effect that (roads) have,” he says. “They’re the single most important proximate driver of environmental change and degradation. A road goes in and six months later the forest is split open like a splayed fish.” In distant lands, far from government regulation and oversight, a motorway quickly spawns ghost roads — unauthorized byways branching from the central transit spine. In short order, plantation monocultures flatten forests and open-pit mines erupt like infectious pocks. The cleavage of habitats puts native plant and animal populations at greater risk of declines, even extinctions. Curbside, roadkill piles up. So while highways and their byways exert harm in different ways, they are nonetheless critical factors that must be reckoned with, for both conservationists and linguists. We Don’t Need No Education? The work by Bromham and team produced a result that may run counter-intuitive to every reader of this piece. Next to roads, say the investigators, the biggest threat to languages is formal education. Educators may shake their heads, but there’s good evidence that Bromham and colleagues are right. They argue that monolingual education can lead to language shifts, with local Indigenous languages yielding to rising tongues. Young people, looking ahead to professional careers, may be strongly incentivized to adopt the language that advances their aspirations. Various lines of evidence suggest this is, indeed, what happens. An example comes from Papua New Guinea, a tiny nation in Melanesia whose name graces the very top of the list of language-rich countries. That diversity is endangered, in large part, due to high school education, say Alfred Kik (University of Goroka) and Vojtěch Novotný (Czech Academy of Sciences). They’re long-term investigators in Papua New Guinea who have been documenting students’ Indigenous language skills and knowledge of local flora and fauna. Their work demonstrates a “precipitous” decline in both. The result derives, they argue, from the push for children to learn English, which is used in schools and perceived to be the language of opportunity. The shift is also related to the spread of Tok Pisin, a type of pidgin English used extensively as the lingua franca in multilingual settings, including cafeterias and playgrounds. The message is not that formal education should be eliminated for the sake of global linguistic diversity. The lesson, rather, is that the language of instruction, which is usually determined by education policy and funding availability, is highly consequential. Multilingual education is a possible antidote, especially in the context of environmental education.

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