Posts Tagged ‘costa rica’
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CI Vice President Receives Conservation Award
Last week in New York City, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, CI’s Vice President for Conservation Policy, received an award for his outstanding effort in the fight to conserve jaguar (Panthera onca) populations in Central America. The former Minister of the Environment and Energy in his home country of Costa Rica, Rodriguez has been instrumental to regional conservation efforts for many years. He has helped pioneer the concept of payment for ecosystem services, a system that CI is now implementing with local communities in ecosystems around the globe. The Rabinowitz-Kaplan prize was presented to Rodriguez by the Panthera Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated ... -
Ecosystems Know No Bounds
In a recent news report, the Nicaraguan government announced that it will soon begin a $1 million project to reroute the San Juan River near the Costa Rican border – a river which has long been a source of dispute between Nicaragua and its neighbor to the south. A Nicaraguan development committee claims that 1,700 cubic meters (more than 5,577 cubic feet) per second of water flow – enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every second – was lost from the San Juan after Costa Rica diverted it sixty years ago toward their own Colorado River. The rerouting project ... -
The Leatherback: Earth’s Last Dinosaur
I was 14 and in awe of the seafaring skills of my uncles Sal and Tony, but actually we’d ventured only a few miles into the Atlantic; you didn’t have to go far to catch Bluefin Tuna in the 1960s. I was wound with anticipation of a heavy fishing rod suddenly bending under the frightening power of a great fish. I was gazing with a child’s eyes into the infinity beneath us when suddenly a strange sea beast appeared at the surface about fifty yards off our stern. It was a creature so large the sea broke into whitecaps across ... -
Ecotouring Costa Rica
Tom Friedman has long been a good friend to CI. In his most recent column, he's exploring Costa Rica with CI's Carlos Manuel Rodríguez. Costa Rica is a great success story, and Rodríguez has been one of the country's most ardent proponents of environmental conservation. From Friedman: Rodríguez ... helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for.... Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep their forests intact and their rivers clean should be paid, because ...
