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Costa Rica restored its forests and switched to renewable energy — what can the world learn from it?

By Justine Calma, a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.

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Switch to renewable energy. Stop deforestation. Restore ecosystems. They’re lofty goals that more and more corporations and governments are setting for themselves. If it seems too ambitious, just look to Costa Rica. It’s the first tropical country to have reversed deforestation, and it generates nearly 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources of energy.  

There’s a lot to learn from those successes and even more to gain from the challenges the country now has to tackle. Seasons are increasingly unpredictable. Could climate change upend past victories? Meanwhile, Indigenous leaders face violence from people trying to stop their campaigns to reclaim and reforest Indigenous territories. Can the country undo a history of land grabbing?

The Verge explored those questions on the ground in Costa Rica, with support from the International Center for Journalists and local media organization Punto y Aparte, and discovered hard-learned lessons that cross borders.

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    Justine Calma

    Apr 22

    Justine Calma

    Want to restore a forest? Give it back to Indigenous peoples who call it home

    Photo collage of Doris Ríos in a composition of green organic shapes.
    Doris Ríos is a Cabécar leader who has fought to reclaim Indigenous territory in Costa Rica.
    Collage by Israel Vargas | Photos by Justine Calma

    Doris Ríos ducks gracefully under barbed wire fencing, wearing knee-high black rubber boots, a black dress, and the black horn of a beetle dangling from a beaded necklace. Until recently, this barrier would have kept her out of a ranch operating on Indigenous Cabécar territory. Now, the fencing protects rows of young guava trees that she and other Indigenous women planted on land they took back from the company that once illegitimately occupied it.

    The land is healing. Ríos’ dark eyes are piercing as she stops to survey the terrain, her jet-black hair falling gently in layers from chin to collarbone. She looks out over a green hillside where young saplings are just starting to peek above tall grass. The trail on the other side of the barbed wire is orange dirt; it kicks up into dust when dry and cakes into muddy clay when wet. 

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  • Justine Calma

    Apr 27

    Justine Calma

    They turned cattle ranches into tropical forest — then climate change hit

    Photo collage of Daniel Janzen and biologist Winnie Hallwachs in a composition of blue organic shapes.
    Collage by Israel Vargas

    Ecologist Daniel Janzen wades into the field, clutching a walking stick in one hand and a fist full of towering green blades of grass in the other to steady himself. Winnie Hallwachs, also an ecologist and Janzen’s wife, watches him closely, carrying a hat that she hands to him once he stops to explain our whereabouts. 

    Together with other conservationists who have dedicated decades of their lives to this place, the couple has brought forests back to the Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). It’s ​​an astonishing 163,000 hectares of protected landscapes — an area larger than the Hawaiian island of Oahu — where forests have reclaimed farmland in Costa Rica.   

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  • Justine Calma

    Apr 24

    Justine Calma

    What happens after your country runs on 99 percent renewable electricity?

    Photo collage of Marco Jiménez Chavez and Kenneth Lobo Méndez in a composition of yellow organic shapes.
    Kenneth Lobo Méndez, director of planning and sustainability in electricity management, and Marco Jiménez Chavez, an engineer, at the state-run electricity utility Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE).
    Collage by Israel Vargas | Photos by Justine Calma

    While most of the world still runs on dirty fossil fuels, Costa Rica has generated nearly all of its electricity from renewable sources of energy for nearly a decade. For comparison, the US generates just over 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.

    Costa Rica made global headlines in 2015 for generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy for 75 days in a row. Today, it consistently gets around 99 percent of its electricity from renewables. Even so, it’s not a perfect system. Climate change poses new risks to the power grid, and Costa Rica has a lot of work left to do to get more solar and wind farms online. 

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