Are banana farms contaminating Costa Rica's crocodiles?

Seed Daily via SPX: Shoppers spend over Pounds 10 billion on bananas annually and now this demand is being linked to the contamination of Central America's crocodilians. New research, published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, analyses blood samples from spectacled caiman in Costa Rica and finds that intensive pesticide use in plantations leads to contaminated species in protected conservation areas.

"Banana plantations are big business in Costa Rica, which exports an estimated 1.8 million tonnes per year; 10% of the global total," said author Paul Grant from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. "The climate of the country's North East is ideal for bananas; however, the Rio Suerte, which flows through this major banana producing area, drains into the Tortuguero Conservation Area."

Tortuguero is home to the spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus), one of the most common species of crocodilian in Central America. This freshwater predator is known to be highly adaptive, feeding on fish, crustaceans and in the case of larger specimens, wild pigs.

Due to the increased global demand for fruit, pesticide use has more than doubled across Central America in the past twenty years. In Costa Rica, which ranks second in the world for intensity of pesticide use, the problem of contamination is compounded by environmental conditions and lax enforcement of regulations.

"Frequent heavy rains can wash pesticides from plantation areas, leading to contamination and the reapplication of sprays to the crops," said Grant. "Without adequate enforcement of regulations dangerous practices such as aerial spraying close to streams or washing application equipment in rivers also contributes to contamination downstream."...

A spectacled caiman, from the BioTrek California website, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Climate change causes $1.1 billion in losses in Costa Rica

The Tico Times (Costa Rica): A recent study released by Costa Rican officials shows that the country has accumulated approximately $1.13 billion in losses due to climate change from 2005 to 2011, primarily along coastal areas. The investigation was based on a report by climate change expert Roberto Flores about how to adapt to climate change. The study was released Sunday in the weekly business newspaper El Financiero.

Rural areas were hit the hardest, and 50 percent of damages affected highway infrastructure. The other damages were distributed between agriculture (16.7 percent), flood control and similar construction projects (13 percent) and homes (12.2 percent). Puntarenas, on Costa Rica’s central Pacific, is the province most affected by climate change, with damages in the six-year period reaching $164.5 million.

Flores, the head of climate change at the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry’s Planning Department, said that the study used data primarily from the National Emergency Commission. William Alpízar, director of climate change at the Environment Ministry, told the weekly newspaper that the phenomenon’s primary effects are increased precipitation, more sickness and higher ocean levels.

These effects are reflected in the nearly $710 million lost due to hydrometeorological changes. For Walter Vergara, an expert in the field at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDP), Costa Rica needs to prioritize prevention, as estimates show that by the middle of the century damages from temperature increases in Latin America could increase to $100 million annually....

Coffee shadow trees in Costa Rica, shot by Dirk van der Made (DirkvdM), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license 

Information flow is vital for ecosystem-based adaptation

Gabriela Ramirez Galindo in Reuters AlertNet: Identifying organizations that can bridge gaps in knowledge is an important step when seeking effective ways to design strategies for local adaptation to climate change, an expert in ecosystem-based adaptation has said.

Such organizations can help create collaborative partnerships between farmers, scientists and policy makers, according to Raffaele Vignola, director of the Latin American Chair of Environmental Decisions for Global Change at Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Costa Rica.

“We have to acknowledge that adaptation takes place within complex and institutional governance contexts”, said Vignola, who conducted research into the Birris sub-watershed in central Costa Rica, where a combination of extreme rainfall, intensive horticulture and grazing dairy cattle on steep slopes has caused severe erosion, a problem for farmers and the hydropower sector.

The region upstream of the watershed is subject to intensive agricultural production. Over the past 40 years, the observed and projected increase in extreme precipitation events related to climate change promise to augment the vulnerability of these areas to soil erosion. At the same time, hydropower dams downstream are being affected by erosion upstream — leading to annual costs of more than $2 million to flush out sediment and dredge the dams.

Birris is part of the Reventazón watershed, Costa Rica’s main area for hydropower production where dams provide more than 37 percent of the country’s electricity supply. Interactions among actors with different interests, mandates, languages and comprehension of problems and solutions influence the way collective action can promote conservation in such vulnerable watersheds as Birris, Vignola said....

Rio Sucio, in Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo, Costa Rica, shot by Tim Ross, public domain

As weather shifts, coffee farmers struggle to protect crops

The Youngstown Vindicator via the Seattle Times: A mile above this rural mountain town [Santa Maria de Dota in Costa Rica], coffee trees have produced some of the world’s best arabica beans for more than a century. Now farmers are planting even higher — at nearly 7,000 feet — thanks to warmer weather.

“We noticed about six years ago, the weather changed,” said Ricardo Calderon Madrigal, whose family harvests ripe, red coffee cherries at the higher elevation. He sells beans to some of the most notable coffeehouses in the U.S., including Stumptown Coffee of Portland, Ore., and Ritual Coffee in San Francisco.

…Yields in Costa Rica have dropped dramatically in the past decade, with farmers and scientists blaming climate change for a significant portion of the troubles. Many long-established plantation owners have seen trees wither or flower too early. Some have given up. Others are trying to outwit changes in temperature, wind and rain with new farming techniques and hardier tree varieties.

…Most important, the fate of coffee in Costa Rica could be a bellwether for food production — and prices — globally, as farmers around the world cope with mudslides, droughts and creeping changes in temperature. Almost all coffee grows in the tropics, and in general, tropical species are more sensitive to climate change, said Joshua Tewksbury, the Walker professor of natural history at the University of Washington. There are more species there, they can withstand only a narrow band of temperatures, and they are not likely to adapt well to change.

…Costa Rica has 25 percent fewer acres planted in coffee than it did a decade ago, according to the national coffee agency iCafe. Roughly 10,000 farmers have quit coffee, some converting their land to pasture for cattle or dairy businesses. The remaining coffee farms produce less, with yields down 26 percent in a decade…

A coffee plantation in Costa Rica, back when

Threats churn in the San Juan River

José Adán Silva in IPS via Tierramérica: The San Juan River, centre of discord and diplomatic conflicts between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, is seeing its riverbanks fill up with economic projects that scientists and environmentalists say will irreversibly alter its course. According to biologist Salvador Montenegro, director of Nicaragua's Centre for Aquatic Resource Investigation, a hydroelectric project agreed between the governments of Brazil and Nicaragua in 2007 would seriously harm the biodiversity of the San Juan and the nature reserves in the surrounding areas.

Montenegro said the planned Brito Hydroelectric project (Hidrobrito SA) would require a dam 10 metres high and 400 metres wide to achieve the water level necessary, and would reverse the natural draining of Lake Cocibolca (also known as Lake Nicaragua) to the Caribbean, sending it instead towards the Pacific Ocean.

The project is still going through studies, but would be built in 2015, has a price tag of more than 900 million dollars and, according to Nicaragua's ministries of Energy and Environment, would generate 250 megawatts of electricity.

In Montenegro's view, the damage to the plant and animal species of the San Juan would be "catastrophic." The dam would affect the biodiversity of the lake and the rivers, as well as the land, aquatic and marine ecosystems, and the livelihoods of fishers and farmers living in low-lying areas.

With the flow of freshwater to the Pacific, the coastal zone would lose salinity, potentially harming thousands of marine and coral reef species. It would likely affect the migration of endangered sea turtles, which arrive there each year to lay their eggs on the beach refuges of Chacocente and La Flor, in the southern Nicaraguan department of Rivas.

The company in charge of the project, Brazil's Andrade Gutiérrez Construction, acknowledged to the Nicaraguan authorities that there would be environmental damage, and proposed alternatives that the government is now studying….

The San Juan River in Nicaragua, shot by Rodrigo Castillo

Coverage prompts national climate change strategy in Costa Rica

Inside Costa Rica: An investigative series by Costa Rican journalist Pablo Fonseca, one of this year’s Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) Fellows in Cancun, helped prompt the government to enact new policies to address climate change and environmental issues. With colleagues Alejandra Vargas and Marcela Cantero, Fonseca wrote a series of investigative reports on the affects of climate change on Costa Rica for the daily, La Nación, the largest national paper in Costa Rica.

The 2007 five-part series covered sea level rise and coastal erosion, floods, endangered species, biodiversity, health and carbon emissions. “The series we did on climate change brought the issues home for Costa Ricans. Before, most people thought of it as a problem in Africa or some other place, but never realized how much climate change was affecting our daily lives as Costa Ricans,” said Fonseca.

The series prompted the government to act. Shortly following its publication, the government created the National Strategy for Climate Change. President Oscar Arias Sánchez declared that Costa Rica would be carbon neutral by 2021, and personally spearheaded the creation of Peace with Nature, a presidential initiative with “a strong political commitment to fight against environmental degradation.”…

Saving rainforests may help reduce poverty

Georgia State University News: A new study shows that saving rainforests and protecting land in national parks and reserves reduced poverty in two developing countries, according to research by a Georgia State University professor. Paul J. Ferraro, associate professor of economics in GSU’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, with four co-authors, looked at the long term impacts of the poor living near parks and reserves established in 1985 or earlier in Costa Rica and Thailand.

The logic goes against the conventional wisdom that says taking away resources, such as farm land and forests, exacerbates poverty. “The results are surprising,” Ferraro said. “Most people might expect that if you restrict resources, people on average will be worse off.”

The research, entitled “Protected areas reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America journal.

The authors speculate that the conservation of biodiverse areas may have helped the poor because of tourism and infrastructure, such as new roadways, which may have provided new economic opportunities.

While Costa Rica and Thailand are not representative of all developing nations, Ferraro said the results are promising. He said the study can be replicated elsewhere in the world to look at the impacts of efforts to protect the environment and reduce poverty, two of the United Nations Millennium Development goals….

This picture was taken on August 14, 2005. Tapanti National Park, sometimes called Orosí National Park, is a National Park in the Pacific La Amistad Conservation Area of Costa Rica located on the edge of the Talamanca Range, near Cartago. It protects forests to the north of Chirripó National Park, and also contains part of the Orosí River. Great shot by Mardochaios

Climate change could threaten Costa Rican cloud forests, other mountain ecosystems, say UMass Amherst researchers

Some interesting work applying modeling at a regional level. From the University of Massachussetts (Amherst): While melting Arctic sea ice and glaciers have become a symbol of climate change, new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst indicates that highland forests in Costa Rica could also be seriously affected by future changes in climate, reducing the number of species in a region famous for its biodiversity.

“Central America is a major, emerging “hot spot” in the tropics where climate change impacts on the environment will be pronounced, and the loss of species associated with climate has already been identified,” says doctoral candidate Ambarish Karmalkar of the UMass Amherst Climate System Research Center. He recently attended the first conference organized in Costa Rica to study this issue. “We have completed a regional climate model showing that many areas of Costa Rica will become warmer and dryer as climate change accelerates, and these changes will be amplified at higher elevations.”

….According to Karmalkar, Costa Rica has a unique geography that supports a stunning array of plants, animals and insects. The land begins at sea level on both the western Pacific coast and the eastern Caribbean coast, rising to over 3,000 meters above sea level in the central mountain range. As the land rises, differences in temperature and precipitation caused by elevation create an array of distinct ecosystems stacked on top of each other, each one housing a unique biological community.

…To predict the effects of climate change, a regional modeling system capable of accommodating the complex topography of Central America was chosen. After validating the computer model using rainfall and temperature data collected in Central America between 1961 and 1990, the team looked at what would happen if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled. The results of this medium-to-high scenario, called the A2 scenario in reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were striking....

A canopy walkway disappearing into a cloud forest near Santa Elena, Costa Rica. Photograph taken by Dirk van der Made, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2