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COSTA RICA |
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The
Race For Carbon Neutrality
By Alex Leff, GlobalPost
Long heralded as a tiny country with a
tenacious commitment to bettering the
environment, Costa Rica now intends to win
the greenest of honors: to become the first
country to go entirely carbon neutral by
2021.
From the northern Caribbean canals of
Tortuguero to the lush southwest Osa
Peninsula, going green has long been the
mantra. The country's national tourism
campaign slogan is "Costa Rica, no
artificial ingredients." Nearly all the
electricity consumed by Ticos is renewable,
with as much as 80 percent generated by
hydroelectric power
Lifting the country's entire CO2 footprint
is widely seen as the next frontier — and
Costa Rica isn't alone in this race. Other
green Samaritans include Iceland, New
Zealand and Norway.
However, a chorus of skeptics — including
scientists, environmentalists and even some
of the c-neutrality plan’s supporters — is
chiming in about Costa Rica's chances.
Though households are fueled by cleaner
energy, Costa Rica's vehicles continue to
guzzle gasoline. As automobile ownership
booms, emissions are rising faster than they
can be offset.
Costa Rica has focused much of its effort to
remove its carbon footprint on growing
forests, which capture CO2 naturally.
Worldwide deforestation accounts for as much
as 20 percent of global carbon emissions,
according to Rainforest Alliance, an
international conservation organization.
But Orlando Chinchilla, director of the
National University’s Institute for Forestry
Research and Services, thinks there simply
is not going to be enough space remaining to
grow vegetation needed to offset Costa
Rica’s emissions.
"The whole country isn't going to be
reforested. We need to leave room for houses
and infrastructure, to plant crops like rice
and beans, not to mention the African palm
or pineapples,” Chinchilla said.
In the mid-1980s, forests covered about 20
percent of Costa Rica. Through robust
reforestation and conservation projects,
woods have sprawled to about 50 percent. In
one of the programs, the government uses
money collected from a gasoline tax to pay
landowners to preserve trees on their
property or plant new ones.
In the city, however, it's a different
story. In the greater metropolitan area
around San Jose, exhaust-spewing buses, cars
and motorcycles battle for space along the
potholed streets. These are the country's
big polluters, accounting for as much as 70
percent of CO2 emissions, according to a
recent study by
http://www.CO2neutral2021.org,
an NGO consisting of young Costa Rican
professionals who seek to help steer the
country toward its no-footprint goal.
A man discards
an old piece of furniture on a disused plot
of land used as an illegal rubbish dump in
San Jose, Costa Rica, Sept. 28, 2007. The
government collaborated with environmental
organizations to form a team of volunteers
to clean and preserve their local
environments in the fight against the
effects of climatic change. (Juan Carlos
Ulate/Reuters)
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