Why is Costa Rica an environmental sustainable model?
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During the last few years Costa Rica gained international visibility with its environmental strategy, thanks to the use or renewable energies and to the promotion of ecotourism.
Costa Rican sustainability is not a new feature but the result of a strong tradition, based on governmental development strategies, supported by the entire population. Nowadays this tradition is known as the Costa Rican Green Trademark, a real brand of the respect for the environment applied in Costa Rica and exported in all over the world.
Costa Rica has been able to reach modernization and good socio-economic performances respecting the environment and biodiversity.
The most impressive result is the three-months of energetic independence granted by renewable sources, obtained during 2016; this was possible thanks to hydroelectric, geothermic and solar plants.
The last ten years showed an incredible development of the Costa Rican tourism sector, both in terms of number of per-year visitors, than in terms of monetary incoming, with a one-billion dollars growth of the market, between 2007 and 2015.
The most important success of Costa Rica sustainable-history consists in the reforestation process. It started in 1987 and it is still on-going.
During the first years of the twentieth century the percentage of the national territory covered by forests was about 80%, but at the end of the eighties it was a little more over than 20%.
Nowadays Costa Rica is the only one equatorial-country in the world that has been able to successfully reverse the deforestation process on the national green areas; data in 2015 show that the forest coverage is about 50% of the national territory.
In the Costa Rican spectrum of environmental actions one is particularly important, the PES program, Payments for Environmental Services.
This project started in 1996 as an incentive for private landowners in using their forest lands in a sustainable way, in the respect of the environment. To avoid dangerous behaviours the Costa Rican government planned a system based on payments granted to landowners: they receive money in change of a sustainable land use.
There are also others interesting facts in the program: for example, the financial strategy, that is based on a fossil-fuel tax and the fact that PES is a pilot scheme, launched as the first project in the world of its category and still on-going.
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