The Verge takes you to Costa Rica to explore how it restored its forests and manages to get nearly 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy.
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.