In a world in which tropical forests are depleted by roughly 8m hectares gross every year (that’s about the size of the island of Ireland), here is a good news story from Costa Rica, which is one of a few tropical forest countries to have reversed deforestation.
From the 1960s to the 1980s the country had one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, losing more than 100,000 hectares in some years, shrinking forest cover to less than a quarter of its area by 1985. Forty years on, that cover is now well over half. Before we consider how it has done this let us look at what was driving deforestation.
First, large areas were being cleared for cattle ranching, encouraged by rising beef export prices and supported by international loans. Second, population pressure and rural development were eating into forest cover.
So what has happened to turn this around? Four things of which government protection policies have been key. These have included the expansion of national parks and protected areas (now over a quarter of the country is thus designated); strong forest laws and restrictions on clearing; and a 1996 law effectively banning conversion from forest to farming. These all slowed and eventually halted deforestation.
But what happened to increase forest cover? Since the 1990s the government has paid landowners both to protect and restore forest cover, rewarding them under a system called ‘Payment for Ecosystem Services’ (PES).
What this does is to assign a monetary value to nature by recognizing the natural ‘services’ it provides, from sequestering carbon dioxide, to sustaining water supplies, to attracting ecotourism, to providing a home to plants and animals for research and drug development.
Landowners who enter a PES contract with the government (there are now over 20,000 of them) are either paid to plant trees, or to let their land reafforest naturally. Initially the programme was funded by a tax on fuel. Now it raises funds from other sources including a fee on water usage, the idea being that people who use ecosystem services (e.g. water) should help to pay for them.
The PES system has been helped by falling beef prices which has led to land being abandoned, while ecotourism has taken off as an alternative source of income.
There has also been support to the country from a World Bank fund for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
There is much debate about which of these interventions has been the most significant. While PES has been important, some researchers say that its significance has been modest even while, according to one recent study, biodiversity has been enhanced.
Globally attempts to protect forests through ecosystem-service payments have produced mixed results and have rarely worked on their own.
What the Costa Rica story suggests is that forest recovery depends less on any single policy than on decades of consistent political commitment.
Joe Human sustainablekeswick@gmail.com
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