The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has given Reefworld, which claims to be the world’s first fully eco-friendly floating hotel, a go ahead. The hotel is set to be opened to tourists and researchers in 2010 and will feature a full-fledged spa and eight glass-walled underwater bedrooms as well as a research facility for coral and reef research and studies. The project is to be headed by British designer and architect Richard Hywel Evans who has just completed a similar project for a hotel off the cost of Sri Lanka, and will feature extraordinary eco-friendly energy generation systems that will use turbines, solar panels and underwater trickle-charge generators. Though the hotel has sparked a huge interest as a prospective model for its self-sustaining energy generation ambition, locals are greatly opposed to the project and are demanding that the already endangered reef should be permanently closed for constructions of any kind in the future.
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Source: Times Online
