The Country That Bought Its Forest Back
Costa Rica cut down most of its forest for cattle, then spent thirty years paying landowners to put it back — and roughly doubled its forest cover from the low point. The most-cited conservation success on earth, including the parts that get edited out: secondary growth, pesticide intensity and a transport sector nobody has solved.
From the air, coming into Liberia over the Guanacaste lowlands in the dry season, Costa Rica does not look like the country its reputation describes. There are cattle pastures, dry deciduous forest, irrigation, and the long straight lines of commercial agriculture. It is only as the plane turns inland toward the cordillera that the canopy closes and stays closed, and the picture starts matching the brochure.
That mismatch is the whole story. Costa Rica did not preserve its forest. It cut most of it down, worked out what that had cost, and then spent thirty years and a great deal of public money buying it back — becoming, in the process, the most-cited example anywhere of a country reversing national deforestation.
How it was lost
The clearing ran from the 1940s to the 1980s and was driven by beef. International demand, cheap credit for ranching, and a land-titling system that in practice rewarded whoever had cleared a plot produced one of the fastest deforestation rates in the world. Forest cover, which had covered the large majority of the national territory in the middle of the century, fell to somewhere around a fifth to a quarter of it by the mid-1980s, depending on which definition and which survey you accept.
The consequences arrived quickly and locally: silted rivers, degraded hydroelectric reservoirs in a country that had bet its power supply on water, soil loss on steep ground, and a collapse in the wildlife that a nascent tourism sector had begun to notice was worth something.
How it was bought back
The policy response was unusually clear-headed. In 1996 Costa Rica banned the clearing of mature forest without approval and, in the same forestry law, created what became the emblematic instrument: Pago por Servicios Ambientales, payment for environmental services.
The logic is simple to state and was radical at the time. A landowner who keeps forest standing is producing something the country needs — water regulation, carbon storage, biodiversity, scenic value — and receives nothing for it under normal markets, while a landowner who clears for pasture gets paid immediately. PSA closes that gap by paying landowners directly, per hectare, per year, to conserve, reforest or regenerate. The money came substantially from an earmarked share of the fuel tax, plus water tariffs and international climate finance, which is the detail most often left out of the retelling: the scheme worked partly because it had a stable domestic funding source that did not depend on annual budget fights.
Alongside it ran the national park system — which today protects something above a quarter of the national territory when all conservation categories are counted — and an electricity grid that runs very close to fully renewable in most years, overwhelmingly hydro with geothermal, wind and solar behind it.
The result, over three decades, is that forest cover roughly doubled from its low point to somewhere around half the country. There is no other national-scale example quite like it.
Costa Rica did not save its forest. It lost it, priced it, and then paid the bill — which is a far more useful precedent for everybody else.
What actually lives in it
The biodiversity numbers get quoted so often that they have stopped meaning anything, so here is the shape of them. Costa Rica occupies about three ten-thousandths of the world’s land surface and holds something in the order of five per cent of its known species. That ratio is the reason the country is studied rather than merely visited.
The explanation is geological. The isthmus closed roughly three million years ago, joining two continents that had evolved separately for tens of millions of years, and the resulting Great American Biotic Interchange sent North American species south and South American species north through a corridor two hundred kilometres wide. Costa Rica sits in the middle of it. Add two oceans with different temperatures, a mountain spine rising above 3,800 metres, and a rainfall gradient that runs from near-desert to more than six metres a year, and the number of distinct habitats packed into a small country becomes absurd.
The practical consequence for a traveller is that moving two hours changes the species list completely. The dry forest of Guanacaste, which drops its leaves and turns brown for months, is a different world from the Caribbean lowland rainforest that never dries. The cloud forest at Monteverde — where moisture arrives horizontally as wind-driven mist rather than falling as rain, and every branch carries a garden of epiphytes — is different again, and is one of the habitats most exposed to warming, because the cloud base rises as temperatures do.
The emblematic species are worth knowing by more than name. The resplendent quetzal, which the Maya and Aztecs valued above gold, nests in decaying tree trunks and eats wild avocado, which is why it cannot survive in a forest that has had its dead wood tidied away. Sloths move slowly because their diet cannot fund anything faster; the algae in their fur is camouflage and, apparently, occasional food. The strawberry poison-dart frog carries its tadpoles individually to water trapped in bromeliads and returns to feed each one unfertilised eggs. Leatherback and green turtles arrive on both coasts on schedules that predate every human institution in the country.
The parts of the story that get edited out
The reputation has outrun the reality in specific and worth-knowing ways.
Regrown forest is not old-growth forest. Secondary regeneration on former pasture recovers carbon and canopy reasonably fast and recovers species composition very slowly; a fifty-year-old secondary stand and a primary lowland rainforest are not interchangeable ecosystems, and much of the reported gain is the former.
Agriculture intensified as it stopped expanding. Costa Rica has among the highest per-hectare pesticide application rates in the world, driven by intensive export production of pineapple and banana on the Caribbean lowlands, with documented water contamination in some producing regions. The forest statistic and the pesticide statistic describe the same agricultural transition from opposite sides.
And the carbon-neutrality pledges that made international headlines have repeatedly slipped their target dates, principally because the transport sector — a fleet of imported second-hand cars in a country with limited public transport outside the Central Valley — is the emissions problem that a clean grid does not solve.
The country that abolished its army
The forest policy did not appear from nowhere. It sits on top of a political decision taken in 1948, when José Figueres Ferrer, having won a short and bloody civil war, abolished the Costa Rican army and wrote the abolition into the constitution the following year.
The usual telling makes this a act of pacifism. The more useful reading is that it was also an act of budgeting. A small country that does not maintain a standing military has money for other things, and Costa Rica put it into education and health at a moment when most of its neighbours were putting theirs into barracks. The literacy and life-expectancy figures that now sit near the top of the region are the compound interest on that decision.
It also meant that when Central America went through the civil wars of the 1970s and 80s — Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala — Costa Rica had no military establishment to be captured, no officer class with political ambitions, and no coup. President Óscar Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for the regional peace plan he brokered, which is not a thing that happens to countries with armies.
The relevance to a forest is direct. Payment for environmental services is a long-horizon public programme that requires a state capable of collecting a fuel tax, administering thousands of individual landowner contracts, and keeping the money flowing across changes of government for thirty years. Very few countries in the region could have done that. Costa Rica could, because it had spent the previous forty years building the institutions instead of an army.
What this means on the ground
For a traveller, the practical consequence of all this is that Costa Rica genuinely delivers the wildlife, and that the price of it is a tourism sector large enough to have its own footprint.
The Certificación para la Sostenibilidad Turística is the state-run rating scheme worth knowing about — a graded certification for lodges and operators covering waste, water, energy, community employment and cultural impact. It is voluntary and imperfect, and the difference between a certified lodge and an uncertified one that has painted a leaf on its sign is exactly the difference between an audit and a claim.
The other practical rule is to spread out. Manuel Antonio is a small park receiving vast numbers of visitors; Corcovado, on the Osa peninsula, is one of the most biologically intense places on the planet and requires a certified guide and advance permits precisely because of what happened elsewhere. Tortuguero is reached by boat and is a nesting site of global importance for green turtles, with the night-tour access controlled and quotaed. Monteverde’s cloud forest exists in its current form because a group of Quaker settlers bought a watershed in the 1950s and did not log it.
Corridors, not islands
The most important thing happening in Costa Rican conservation right now is also the least photogenic. A national park is an island, and islands lose species — a protected area surrounded by pasture and road slowly sheds the animals that need range, and the ones that remain lose genetic exchange with populations they can no longer reach.
The answer is connectivity: strips of forest linking protected areas so that a jaguar, a tapir or a troop of spider monkeys can move between them. Costa Rica has been building biological corridors for two decades, largely on private land, using the same payment-for-services mechanism that drove the reforestation — which is why the corridors run through farms and why the farmers are participants rather than obstacles.
This is where the country plugs into something much larger. The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor is an eight-country agreement to link protected areas from southern Mexico to Panama, and it is the framework within which Costa Rica’s domestic corridors make sense. Its progress varies enormously by country and it is chronically underfunded, but the concept — that the unit of conservation is the landscape rather than the park — is now the mainstream position rather than the radical one.
The visible version, for a traveller, is the wildlife crossing. Canopy bridges over roads for monkeys and sloths, culverts sized for cats, and the increasingly common sight of a sign warning drivers about a species rather than a bend. It is unglamorous infrastructure and it works.
None of these are secrets. All of them are managed. That is the point of the story: what Costa Rica sells is not wilderness in the sense of country without people. It is a landscape somebody decided to pay for, keeps paying for, and lets you walk into for the cost of a ticket.
Buy the ticket. It is one of the few in the world that provably works.
Mia has reported from thirty-one Asian countries over twelve years, with a soft spot for the ones without a metro. Her temple-conservation series was shortlisted for the Amnesty Media Award. She travels by night train whenever one exists.