Singing waterfalls, roaring rivers, dense forests, volcanoes, intimidating birds of paradise, abundant wildlife qualifiers can be rejected ad infinitum to describe the legendary beauty of this small country surrounded by two turquoise oceans, the Caribbean Sea to the east and the Pacific Ocean to West.
Recognized worldwide for its environmental policy, Costa Rica concentrates 5% of global biodiversity for a territory as large as a tenth of that of France and with only 5 million inhabitants.
He is a pioneer in the fight. against climate change. And paradise for lovers of large, generous spaces and nature. Until the 1980s, Costa Rica massacred hundreds of thousands of hectares of natural forests to be replaced by the intensive cultivation of bananas, pineapples, sugar cane and coffee and by livestock, to the point that forest cover had increased to 25%. in 1985, when it was 75% of the territory in the 1940s.
For more than thirty years, public policies focused on reforestation, biodiversity protection and emissions reduction
of CO2 are transforming the country's development model. Costa Rica is then to become, rightly, an Eldorado of sustainable and nature tourism.
With its 30 national parks and protected forest areas where logging is prohibited, from the peaks up to 3820 meters to Cerro Chirripó, from jungle-covered mountain ranges and its
magnificent coasts, Costa Rica has received almost 2.5 million tourists in 2022, which thus contributed approximately 6% to
its GDP.
By 2050, Costa Rica also claims to completely do without oil. A The law prohibits oil exploration until
2050.
Although Costa Rica concentrates its efforts on its environmental policy,
with, for example, electricity production coming from 98% of renewable energy sources, despite some difficult battles to fight. Against its polluting agriculture, for example, its extensive use of pesticides and Chemical Products. According to the FAO, the country is even among those that use pesticides the most, thus contaminating food and groundwater. From
Increasingly, wastewater treatment is very deficient, as is waste recycling.
Another black point in the country, transportation. Due to the lack of sufficient railways, road traffic and, in particular, the transport of goods are transported by truck, in ways that are often gluttonous in fuel consumption.
In recent years, the country has seen a growth in the number of private vehicles in terms of its economic development.
In this transportation plan, Costa Rica intends to convert 70% of buses and taxis fully electric by 2030. If the
The current government, elected in 2022 and much less green than the previous one, is willing to maintain this agenda, which in February 2023 refused to sign the Escazú agreement.
This important text ratified by 15 countries is intended to protect environmental defenders in Latin America and
guarantee access to justice against environmentally criminal acts.
The model student in the fight against global warming should not relax his efforts.
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