Nature and Human Society: The Quest for a Sustainable World (1997)
Chapter: Biodiversity and Sustainable Human Development: The Costa Rican Agenda
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Biodiversity and Sustainable Human Development:
The Costa Rican Agenda
Biodiversity, particularly tropical biodiversity, has been the focus of public attention in recent years, and much has been written about the compelling arguments that support ensuring its conservation into perpetuity. It is clear that biodiversity must be conserved for ethical, aesthetic, spiritual, and economic reasons. Numerous national and international agreements address these issues. The specific need to harmonize conservation with the socioeconomic development of populations is addressed by the Convention on Biological Diversity.
It is then necessary to face the challenge of implementing biodiversity conservation at a country level and in its social, political, cultural, and economic contexts. Regrettably, there are very few examples of how countries can attain the desired balance between conservation and development.
This paper describes the historical and continuing efforts of Costa Rica in its quest for a model of development that simultaneously allows the conservation of its biological patrimony and satisfies the basic requirements of its population. These efforts are now an integral part of the emerging “sustainable human development” initiative and paradigm, which are expected to guide the country into the next century as it faces the challenges of today's changing world.
Costa Rica is a biologically rich but economically poor, small, developing tropical country that has consolidated as a democracy in the absence of an army and has given high priority to investment in health, education, and welfare. In spite of numerous financial and organizational limitations, which are typical of developing countries, Costa Rica is making substantial advances in integrating biodiversity values into the mainstream of its development.
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The Roots of the Quest for a Sustainable Model of Development in Costa Rica
The relationship between humanity and nature constitutes an issue of growing concern in Costa Rica. The concern stems from the features that have characterized the country's course of development and from the prevailing values and paradigms that are expected to guide Costa Rican society's development in the future.
The aspirations of Costa Rican society are well interpreted in the following paragraph (Arias 1989):
When we work for development, we are seeking an austere and fair life style. We want a society where everybody can satisfy at least his/her basic needs. We do not aspire to a model of development above our possibilities, nor to a society of welfare for a few and of suffering for many. We are neither a part of the armament race, nor a part of an uncontrolled race of economic growth at any cost, that threatens the environment or subdues our people to pressures that weaken our social convenience. We are looking for peace based on the absence of misery, for a democracy more and more participatory and for access to the welfare education provides.
Costa Rica's quest for sustainable biodiversity development is part of a broader initiative of national sustainable human development. In the last 50 years, Costa Rica has followed a development path unique in its region, characterized by a stable political system based on a disarmed democratic government, high economic growth rates (table 1), and substantial advances in social indicators. The product of a sustainable social policy, this process has resulted in high life expectancy and low levels of illiteracy. The proportion of low-income homes was reduced by more than half in 36 years (from 1960 to 1996), and infant mortality to less than one-fourth of what it was in 1960; the human population more than doubled in the same period (MIDEPLAN 1997; Proyecto Estado de la Nación 1994).
The country has naturally made errors. One is that Costa Rica's development model has been based to a great extent on nonsustainable use of natural resources, which has caused the rapid depletion of a substantial portion of the country's
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forest cover. Between 1950 and 1970, Costa Rica lost one-third of its primary forest cover (Hartshorn and others 1982).
The agriculture sector is and has been in the last 50 years one of the main engines of economic development and a generator of the gross national product. However, agricultural development has been based on subsidies and incentives to increase production without agroecologic limitations and considerations and has resulted to a great extent in degradation of land and loss of forest (Fournier 1991; Gámez 1989; Hartshorn and others 1982).
The urgent need to address the environmental problems became increasingly evident, particularly in the first half of this century. Between 1960 and 1980, the country witnessed the strong emergence of a conservation movement; public, academic, and private sectors gradually became involved in different types of efforts and initiatives to address specific aspects of this crisis (Fournier 1991; Gámez and Ugalde 1988; Hartshorn and others 1982). This coincided with a growing national and international interest in the country's natural history and in preserving its biodiversity (Gómez and Savage 1982). It is notable that it was in the old National School of Agriculture (later, the Agriculture College of the University of Costa Rica) that the roots of Costa Rica's environmental thinking emerged between 1940 and 1950 (Fournier 1991).
The National Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Wildlife Service were formally established between 1970 and 1980 under the Ministry of Agriculture and provided an adequate legal framework that enabled the creation and management of national parks and other categories of protected areas. The successful development of the National Park Service and the rapid consolidation of the protected areas in the country's institutional framework are historic landmarks in Costa Rica's quest for a harmonious relationship with nature (Gámez and Ugalde 1988; Gómez and Savage 1982).
Although the following years witnessed a substantial increase in the size and number of protected areas and deforestation rates began to decline, the numerous environmental problems steadily intensified, as well as the organizational and financial problems of the government's environmental agencies, and with them public awareness of their implications increased. Costa Rica needed a comprehensive and integrated natural-resource management program.
The first formal effort to address the need for a congruent national policy for natural-resource management appeared in 1974 in the First National Congress of Renewable Natural Resources (Fournier 1991; Universidad de Costa Rica 1974). However, it was not until 1977 that the need for a new development model that would “achieve a greater level of well being for a greater number of Costa Ricans” was formally addressed at the highest political levels in Costa Rica, during the symposium “The Costa Rica of the Year 2000”, convened by the Ministerio de Planificación Nacional y Política Económica (the Ministry of Planning), or MIDEPLAN. Environmental concerns were included as an inherent component of the country's well-being (Ministerio de Cultura Juventud y Deportes y Oficina de Planificación Nacional y Política Económica 1977).
In 1986, the Ministerio de Recursos Naturales, Energía y Minas (Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy, and Mines) or MIRENEM, was established, and the
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national parks, forest, and wildlife services were transferred to the new ministry, signaling the top political priority assigned to these activities. MIRENEM rapidly consolidated, meeting the urgent need for a political environmental authority in the country that would integrate conservation efforts and define environmental policy.
Between 1987 and 1989, MIRENEM initiated the first formal national process to formulate a conservation strategy for Costa Rica's sustainable development. The process provided an opportunity to analyze the environmental issues in the broader context of the country's social and economic development. For the first time, biodiversity emerged as a key issue in the new view of sustainable development (MIRENEM 1989).
In 1987, a Biodiversity Office was created in MIRENEM to define “a new strategy and conservation program for Costa Rica's wildlands” (Gámez and others 1993). The new strategy and program began to emerge from a highly participatory analysis that capitalized on the country's environmental concerns and accomplishments and on the nearly two decades of conservation experience.
The historical process summarized here led to important changes in biodiversity-conservation thinking, policy, and accomplishments. To reinforce its role in environmental issues, the ministry assumed new responsibilities; its name was changed to Ministerio del Ambiente y Energía (Ministry of Environment and Energy), or MINAE, and the Sistema Nacional de Areas de Conservación (the National System of Conservation Areas), or SINAC, was legally consolidated (Ley Orgánica de Ambiente 1995).
Although this paper focuses on the roles of SINAC and the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (the National Institute of Biodiversity), or INBio, in biodiversity conservation, the contribution of private organizations has been decisive in strengthening Costa Rica's environmental movement. Historically, nongovernment organizations like Fundación de Parques Nacionales, Fundación Neotrópica, the Tropical Science Center, and the Organization for Tropical Studies have played leading roles in supporting the ministry's biodiversity-conservation efforts. Fundación de Parques Nacionales has become a financing entity that has in diverse ways enabled the resources required to buy and administer lands for many conservation areas.
The New Strategy and Organization for Sustainable Biodiversity Development
The new Costa Rican strategy is based on the premise that the best way to conserve biodiversity is to use it sustainably to promote the country's intellectual, spiritual, social, and economic development. The implementation of this strategy requires three overlapping tasks: save large wildlands, determine what biodiversity is found in these wildlands, and use the biodiversity in a sustainable manner (Gámez 1991; Gámez and others 1993; Janzen 1992).
The fulfillment of the first task demanded the reorganization of existing institutions and the emergence of new ones. The national park, forest, and wildlife
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services evolved into SINAC (MIRENEM 1992, 1994). The country was divided into 11 geographic sectors that were called conservation areas (SINAC 1997). The definition of the conservation areas represents a first approach to managing entire bioregions or ecosystems at the national level comprising three categories of land use described below. A positive result of the new policies of rational use of the natural resources is the decrease in the average deforestation rate from 40,000 ha/year in 1986 to 8,000 ha/year in 1994 and an increase in the dense forest cover, which until 1984 had been decreasing continuously (MIDEPLAN 1997).
The country is viewed as divided into three major categories of land use: wildlands conserved for their biodiversity, the agro-pastoral-forestry landscape, and the urban landscape. The three categories of land use are expected to provide different types of equally valuable goods and services and to coexist in harmony so that the activities of one do not harm the others (Presidencia de la República 1994).
Costa Rica is saving representative samples of the species and ecosystems present in the country through a system of protected wildlands within the conservation areas. Nearly 24% of the country is protected under different categories of management, and 11.8% is national parks and reserves (579,412 ha). The remaining areas are forest reserves and wildlife refuges under private ownership (Gar´cia 1996). There are nearly 170 private reserves, representing a notable contribution by the private sector to biodiversity conservation and a clear indication of the increasing understanding of wild biodiversity's social and economic values (MIDEPLAN 1997).
The choice of the particular wildlands to protect has, with notable recent exceptions, been based not on scientific ecological considerations, but mostly on a complex combination of economic and political opportunities (García 1996; Janzen 1992). What has been saved probably includes all that could be protected at the time. Most of but not all the species and ecosystems in the country are thus protected. A strategy and action plan that aims to resolve the problem that some species and ecosystems are unprotected (technical proposals for territorial ordering aimed at the conservation of biodiversity known as Proyecto GRUAS) was recently formulated (García 1996).
According to the existing legislation (SINAC 1997 Asamblea Legislativa), SINAC is a decentralized administrative system in which each conservation area groups and manages state-owned protected wildlands and is responsible for the management of forests and wildlife in private wildlands.
The governance of the conservation areas is under reorganization. Community participation is expected to be incorporated in different ways at the local, regional, and national levels. External national and international conservation authorities are being named to serve as advisers to conservation areas (Asamblea Legislativa).
The fulfillment of the second and third tasks, knowing the biodiversity in the wildlands and using the knowledge to promote its nondestructive use, required the creation of a new organization, Institute Nacional de Biodiversidad, or INBio. A major factor in INBio's creation was the urgent need for an organization solely responsible for conducting a national biodiversity inventory of the protected
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wildlands, centralizing the resulting information, and promoting sustainable use (Gámez 1991; Gámez and others 1993). The value and importance of inventory activities conducted in Costa Rica for over a century by national and international scientific organizations and individuals were recognized. Nevertheless, this approach presented the practical problem of scattered biological specimens and information, as well as diverse and discontinuous inventory approaches, which together made the integration and management of the information difficult. For strategic reasons, INBio was established as a private, public-interest, nonprofit organization. Conceptually, INBio offers an innovative form of direct participation of the civil society in biodiversity conservation and management in direct collaboration and coordination with the government. SINAC and INBio work in close partnership in a strategic alliance supported by a periodically updated legal collaborative agreement that stipulates the rules and regulations that guide the partners' activities (Sittenfeld and Gámez 1993). Both organizations have assumed the leadership and responsibility for implementing the sustainable-biodiversity-development initiative described in this paper. Developing the biodiversity resource base is an ambitious and complex task that no institution can possibly attain by itself. It demands the establishment of strategic alliances and partnerships with widely different sectors of society, nationally and internationally, as an inherent component of any socially sustainable scheme. That means interactive work among, for example, the scientific-academic, economic, industrial, political, agricultural, educational, tourist, conservationist, mass-media communication, urban, and rural sectors. Partnerships and alliances for the ulterior purpose of biodiversity conservation into perpetuity demand, in many cases, drastically changed views, attitudes, and traditions that are ingrained in the core activities of many sectors of society, including the scientific and academic sectors.
The direct involvement of all sectors of society in the implementation of the sustainable-biodiversity-development initiative is of paramount strategic importance. All sectors must perceive and play a direct role and be actors rather than spectators. For example, entities that traditionally have concentrated the decision-making power must delegate authority and responsibility, and nongovernment organizations must share roles historically played by government agencies.
INBio's parataxonomists program is a good and successful example of the rural sector's direct involvement in a scientific activity previously considered almost exclusively pertinent to the scientific-academic sector. It has succeeded, among other reasons, because of the acceptance by the scientific sector of this mutually beneficial partnership (Janzen 1992; Reid and others 1993).
The sustainability paradigm must also be applied to the institutions responsible for conducting the sustainable-biodiversity-development process, which demands strong and viable organizations that are capable of dealing with complex problems. That means implementing organizational development schemes that define and follow the institutional mission, guide strategic planning and reengineering processes, and seek financial security.
Both SINAC and INBio are addressing those issues, SINAC in the context of a government entity when the government is down-sizing and budgets are being drastically reduced, and INBio as a nongovernment organization dependent
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entirely on its own capabilities to conceive and implement initiatives and raise and generate necessary funds.
Since its inception in 1987, SINAC's institutional organization and wildland management have been undergoing a dynamic process of change. SINAC is still far from consolidation and is required to face the challenge of responding to the new conceptual premise of biodiversity conservation through its sustainable use. As a government organization, SINAC has been affected by the problems of inefficiency and inefficacy in public administration common in developing countries. In spite of these internal difficulties and the country's growing environmental problems, SINAC has made substantial advances toward the implementation of the new philosophy and organization. These include a more congruent perspective on and criteria for natural-resource management and conservation, decentralization, and the staff's growing perception of SINAC's role as a public-service organization (SINAC 1997).
SINAC seeks to achieve the final delimitation of the national territory protected for its biodiversity and the integration of the Costa Rican system of wildlands as part of the initiative of a Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (García 1996; Proyecto Corredor Biológico Mesoamericano Informe Técnico Regional, unpublished).
In the quest for a sustainable model of development, the government of Costa Rica established the Sistema Nacional de Desarrollo Sostenible (National System for Sustainable Development), or SINADES, which is headed by a Sustainable Development Council. SINADES integrates different sectors of societyincluding the government, industry, universities, and civil societyand serves as a forum for analysis and discussion. It also responds to the issues of Program 21, Convention on Climate Change, and the convention Biological Diversity that the country has signed and ratified. The Ministry of Planning functions as the executive secretariat of SINADES.
To address specific topics of sustainability, specialized consultative commissions were created. One of these, the Comisión Asesora de Biodiversidad (the Biodiversity Advisory Commission), or COABIO, was responsible for policy and planning issues related to the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the national level (Gámez and Obando 1995). COABIO was composed of 13 experts on the different topics of the convention. It also serves as the technical-scientific advisory body to the government in all international activities of the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity. With the approval of the new biodiversity law in 1998, COABIO was replaced with the Comisión Nacional para la Gestión de la Biodiversidad (National Commission for Biodiversity Management) CONAGEBIO.
COABIO, in coordination with SINAC and INBio, assessed the state of knowledge of Costa Rican biodiversity and analyzed the accomplishments and failures of the initiatives historically conducted in conservation by the different national public and private organizations. This study will lead to a reformulation of the country's biodiversity strategy and action plan, highlighting gaps where actions are required or need to be corrected. COABIO also collaborated directly in formulating biodiversity legislation.
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Sustainable Biodiversity Development in Practice:
Bringing the Potential Benefits of Biodiversity in the Wildlands to Costa Rican Society
The environmental services supplied by protected areas that were taken for granted for many decades, such as water production and fixation of carbon dioxide, are now starting to be valued and included in national accounts. These services have an important potential to increase the income generated as payments from industry and other sectors of society as the real costs are internalized.
Biodiversity as a source of information also has great potential. INBio was created in 1989 solely for the purpose of conserving Costa Rica's biodiversity into perpetuity. This pilot project responded to the needs to accelerate generation of knowledge of wildland biodiversity and to promote the use of this knowledge as a tool for the country's economic, social, and intellectual development (Gámez 1991, 1996; Gámez and Gauld 1993; Gámez and others 1993; INBio 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997; Janzen 1992; Sittenfeld and Lovejoy 1995).
One of the major steps toward making biodiversity accessible to society has been INBio's design and implementation of an innovative biodiversity-inventory method in collaboration with SINAC. This has produced a high-quality taxonomic reference collection of over 2 million specimens of Costa Rica's arthropods, plants, mollusks, and fungi. The effort has resulted in substantial increases in the knowledge of the country's biodiversity. INBio's inventory through collaborative efforts has described new species, new records of species described elsewhere in the tropics, and new distribution records for known species. The inventory is conducted by teams composed of parataxonomists in the field, technicians, curators, and national and international expert taxonomists. Specimens are collected by parataxonomists in biodiversity stations in the conservation areas, giving the inventory a wide geographic spatial coverage and continuity through time as field collection occurs continuously throughout the year.
The parataxonomists' participation has important social implications in that the inventory is in itself an educational experience and a vehicle for intellectual promotion for an important ruralsector of the population (Gámez 1996; Janzen 1992). Rather than playing marginal roles, rural residents have become main actors in the scientific effort to know the biodiversity of the country. It also means building up local scientific capability and direct sources of knowledge in the conservation areas, which are then available to the schools of neighboring rural communities. Being a parataxonomist also brings in economic benefits to rural families. The economic benefits have multiplying effects in the rural communities, which rapidly perceive the benefits of the activities conducted in the protected wildlands.
The on-the-job training received by national expert curators with basic degrees in biology has enabled the institution to develop and consolidate an increased taxonomic capacity while conducting the inventory process. This has occurred under circumstances in which the country did not have the time or the financial resources available to build up a core group of taxonomic specialists with
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higher academic degrees, as would normally be expected in a rich industrial country (Janzen 1992).
The success of INBio's inventory method has been made possible by the active and permanent collaboration of an increased number of expert taxonomists from North America and Europe and their institutions. For the international collaborator, this mutually beneficial initiative translates into training parataxonomists and technicians, tutoring local curators, and identifying properly curated specimens, which are often sorted to the morpho-species level. It also represents an extremely efficient use of visiting taxonomists' time.
Conceptually, the inventory represents the first step in making biodiversity in the wildlands available for social and economic uses. It is a user-oriented inventory guided by objectives not always compatible with interests in scientific academic sectors (Gámez 1996; Janzen 1992), as illustrated in recent publications (Gámez and others 1997; Kaiser 1997).
Biodiversity-information management is the core of INBio. In the inventory process, field samples are accompanied by basic data indicating where, when, by whom, and how the specimens were collected. The raw data are enhanced via a process involving the use of scientific and technological know-how in chemistry, taxonomy, geography, information management, and other fields. The information generated is provided in an appropriate format to economic and intellectual users (GIS, multimedia field guides, books, lectures, tours, and so on); at the same time, it constitutes feedback for the process of generating more information (INBio 1997).
Biodiversity prospecting appears in profile as one of the industrial goals for the 21st century, and biodiversity-rich tropical developing countries, such as Costa Rica, have a unique opportunity to lead the process (Mateo 1996; Sittenfeld and Lovejoy 1995). Even before the emergence of the Convention on Biological Diversity, INBio's policies recognized the need to establish collaborative research agreements and mutually beneficial partnerships with industry in the developed world, as stated by Eisner (1989). Those policies set guidelines for working with commercial partners under mutually agreed-on terms that recognized the country's ownership of the materials, the need for technology transfer and scientific capacity-building, the equitable sharing of benefits derived from the commercialization of products, and the strategic need to contribute from the beginning to SINAC's conservation activities (Janzen and others 1993; Sittenfeld and Gámez 1993).
The above considerations have emerged from internal analysis and discussions with the government, political, and private sectors and in accordance with prevailing advanced thinking and existing legislation. For those reasons, INBio's initiatives have been supported by four consecutive government administrations since 1989. However, INBio underestimated the difficulties of communicating the complex nature of collaborative research agreements in bioprospecting to the general public. That and ideological factors account to a large extent for the concerns that emerged among some national and international groups after the pioneer agreement with Merck and Company in 1991.
In addition to Merck's agreement (Reid and others 1993; Sittenfeld 1995), INBio has entered several collaborative research agreements with corporations in
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the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biotechnological, and agricultural sectors (Mateo 1996; Sittenfeld and Artuso 1995). As a result, the organization has developed substantial knowledge and expertise in the complex array of subjects involved in bioprospecting, including legislation, terms of agreement, business negotiation, science and technology, and information required from inventories.
On the basis of the experience and know-how gained by the organization, INBio will need to increase its scientific and technological capacities substantially to change from a reliable partner capable of providing a wide variety of extracts from diverse organisms to a partner capable of providing chemically defined molecules with known biological activities determined through bioassays. This possibility appears more likely as the institution enters innovative types of partnerships with national universities and other organizations that have stronger scientific and technological capacities.
The future need to focus on problems of national relevance in agriculture, health, and industry is also clear to INBio. These initiatives might not be perceived as having high priority from a financial point of view, but they are certainly important from a local social perspective. INBio's experiences in bioprospecting have served to formulate national policy and legislation, as exemplified by Costa Rica's new biodiversity legislation. This knowledge has also been shared with others in African and Latin American countries through technical workshops.
The experiences of the conservation areas, INBio, and other organizations, point to four major categories of social and intellectual users and uses: ecotourism, management of wildlands, political decision-making, and education.
The tourist boom experienced by Costa Rica is closely linked to the attraction to its natural beauty and protected areas. Tourism is the country's main source of foreign incomegreater than coffee, cattle, and banana production (MIDEPLAN 1997). Current and future trends highlight the need to increase the competitiveness of the country in ecotourism by adding substantially more information value to the activity. Such value should be reflected in the information made available to visitors through guided tours, field guides, CD ROMS, and other forms of interactive presentations and learning experiences. Parks and reserves should logically be equally prepared to deal with increased national and international visits. However, with the benefits of nature-oriented visits come environmental threats. Costa Rica needs to improve its policies and regulations, particularly those related to wildland visitation. To deal properly with those issues, area managers need suitable information and the institutional capacity to introduce it in their management plans. INBio's inventory information emerges as the logical source of information for the conservation areas.
Information for political decision-makers, for both national and local governments, has high priority in Costa Rica. If biodiversity needs to rank high in political agendas, politicians need not only be more educated on the subject, but also have adequate information readily available for sound policy-making. This information should also be available to public constituencies as a whole.
The SINAC-INBio partnership is addressing and beginning to implement initiatives congruent with the preceding notions. As stated in the introductory section of this paper, education in Costa Rica has historically had top national
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priority and been a major factor in the country's particular course of development. The solution to the complex problems associated with the conservation of biodiversity into perpetuity and its sound use in the context of the sustainable-human-development initiative depends heavily on a bioliterate population. “Bioliteracy” is evolving as the leading idea in INBio's emerging educational activities, now enthusiastically endorsed by Costa Rica's Ministerio de Educación Publica (Ministry of Public Education, or MEP).
Bioliteracy is defined as an experiential process that guides a person to understand biodiversity and to adopt a principle of respect for life in all forms. This basic understanding fosters changes in behavior that enable harmonious relations with nature to achieve sustainable human development (INBio 1996). Bioliteracy is equated to literacy in its conventional meaning and so must be part of the basic educational process that allows a person to read and write, add and subtract, and, in this case, learn the basics of nature's language. The bioliteracy initiative seeks the consolidation of moral values and the development of new attitudes toward nature, in the sense formulated by Wilson (1992). The development of the proper method for inculcating bioliteracy is part of a pilot project conducted jointly by INBio and two rural public schools under MEP's supervision.
The experimental activities include workshops, field trips, and interactive learning with computer aids. INBio is building on several national experiences, such as the National Computers in Education Program, a joint initiative of the Omar Dengo Foundation and the Ministry of Education; the Biological Education Program of the Guanacaste Conservation Area; and the methodological know-how of the parataxonomists program.
This new environmental ethic is a fundamental pillar of a sustainable society and a sustainable world. Bioliteracy addresses the complex problems of valuation of biodiversity and its key role in sustainability.
What Costa Rica has done in its quest for a sustainable-human-development scheme is due largely to the prolonged investment in peace and development of human capabilities. The integration of the environment variable, represented by its rich biodiversity, is congruent with the country's values and expectations. Intellectual and economic international collaboration has been fundamental in complementing the country's efforts in its quest. Costa Rica's experience constitutes a pilot project for many other tropical developing countries. Furthermore, the Central American region can benefit from the information and knowledge generated by the Costa Rican experience. It might also be a viable example of compliance with the terms of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
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