To better understand Carlos Manuel Rodríguez’s impact on his country, it is important to understand what continuously motivated him and pressured him to lead an innovative climate policy throughout his career by giving more context of Costa Rica. Due to its geographical position, reliance on natural resources for agriculture and food production, as well as being an eco-tourism hub, Costa Rica is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Vulnerability to oceanic climate events
Costa Rica is one of the few countries (out of 22) that have coasts to two different oceans (the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean), making it especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In an interview ahead of COP27, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez pointed out that the country is ‘subject to strange water events such as hurricanes and droughts’. In fact, the Climate Change Knowledge Portal (CCKP) writes that the country has the 8th highest economic risk exposure to three or more hazards and that almost 80% of the country’s population resides in an area at high risk for floods, cyclones, storms, rising sea levels and landslides.
Given the vulnerabilities of the population, there is high support for stringent environmental policies. According to a survey by the European Investment Bank on Costa Rican environmental policy, 89% of respondents agreed that the environment and sustainable growth should be prioritised over economic growth at any cost; further, 90% of respondents believe that climate policies should be stricter. However these statistics can also be explained with the fact that Costa Rica thrives on eco tourism, which represents 5.5% of the GDP, but this figure was larger pre-covid, where ecotourism represented above 20% of the GDP in 2019; for this industry to keep existing,
it is necessary to maintain sustainable growth and strict climate laws that protect their natural resources. Moreover, the country’s culture of valuing and protecting natural resources over economic growth has given the government the opportunity to take advantage of natural resources and further profit from ecotourism.
In his third term as Environmental Minister, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez stated that ecotourism and the concern for the environment were elements that set the basis for the relationship between the government of Costa Rica and civil society, demonstrating the priority that environmentalism is given by both himself and the government.’ With this we can explain why Carlos Manuel Rodríguez has been successful at implementing revolutionary climate policies: because the political culture encourages him to do so, giving that the environment is a priority.
Water pollution
Another one of the issues that Costa Rica still faces is pollution of water, woods, and oceans. The country’s water system is managed by the Costa Rican Institute of Aqueducts and Sewage (AyA, for its initials in Spanish), and as recently as January of this year there was still a water pollution crisis in the country which has affected more than 100,000 people across 5 cantons. Additionally, local newspapers reported that the AyA initially denied any contamination of the water when citizens started reporting issues.
In other provinces of the country, there have been more serious water emergencies where more than 65,000 residents were found to be consuming water that contained a cancer-causing pesticide at amounts exceeding 200 times the legal limit, according to an investigation done in June 2023, the date which the first tanker of clean water was reported to be delivered to the citizens. Carlos Manuel Rodríguez has commented on this issue, calling it ‘el gran tema ambiental pendiente’ — the big pending environmental issue — claiming also that this issue has to be solved within the next decade in order to prevent further damage not only to Costa Ricans but to the environment.
Deforestation
The third climate issue is deforestation, which historically was caused because during the 1950s to the 1990s, Costa Rica’s economic model depended largely on the plantation of crops and cattle ranching, which needed more land area. Rodríguez highlighted in an interview that this had placed the country in a bad situation since this industry was destroying the country’s biodiversity at staggering rates. Here he also stated that at that time, deforestation in Costa Rica was such a huge industry it ‘formed the basis of the country’s development model’.
Deforestation in Costa Rica reached its peak in the 1970s when it became one of the countries in Latin America with the highest rates of deforestation, 1987 more than 50% of Costa Rica’s forests had been destroyed.
Carlos Manuel Rodríguez reminisced about the effects of deforestation in Costa Rica when he was a child, ‘when I was growing up, there are 2 things I remember from deforestation […] which was the number of trucks with timber and the number of trucks with cattle,’ He further talked about this topic in an interview for the newspaper Delfino, where he said ‘when I was 16, 17 years old, I realised we were destroying the country’.
In the end, seeing the effects of deforestation first-hand had motivated him to change the country’s economic and political landscape through legislation. At the start of his career in politics, he even considered starting a Green Party with some friends in the 1990s, but this option was vetted and they decided instead to try to work within traditional political parties to try to pass legislation.
In another interview, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez explained that in the 90s the Costa Rican politicians changed from a ‘conservationist’ approach, which he claimed had been the trend between the 60s and 80s to an ‘environmentalist’ approach; while he did not clarify what each of these terms meant in the context of his country, we can assume that Rodríguez meant that the politicians of this conservationist period had a limited focus, with limited results given that deforestation was at its peak during this time period.
He proceeded to explain that this drastic change was an effect of the Cold War ending, ‘new members came into our groups, which were not very much interested in preserving nature rather than bringing other environmental and social issues into the cause.’
Therefore in the 1990s, we saw a new type of legislation being introduced: the fossil fuel extraction laws part of the new forest code. Fossil fuel extraction, which at the time was one of the most profitable industries and had little regulation, started to be taxed according to the new legislation. This is very significant since it meant that politicians favoured protecting the environment over making profits, thus marking the start to an end of deforestation in the country.
Now, Costa Rica has put in place a plan to permanently ban fossil fuel extraction and decarbonize by 2050. Although the reason for such a strong climate policy might also stem from the prospect of economic gains since the country’s eco-tourism brings the country almost 2 billion US dollars a year.
With this it is clear how Carlos Manuel Rodríguez was able to build his policies based on the precedent of 1990s legislation where politics shifted to a more environmental focus and it helps explain why he did not face a lot of limitations when trying to implement new ideas as Minister of Environment and Energy.
IExRAIA Summer Research Program:
This article is an excerpt from a report about Carlos Manuel Rodriguez produced as part of an RAIA research program on climate leaders. For a full picture of Rodriguez’s climate leadership, read the full report. This project was fully financed by IE University’s IE School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs.
Authors: Francisco Jeldres and Valeria Flores
Editor: Francia Morales
Project Lead: Francia Morales
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