Restoring Environmental Leadership in the Face of Institutional Weakening and the Narco-Degradation of Biodiversity in Costa Rica

1. IUSY reaffirms its commitment to environmental democracy, the right of people to a healthy environment, and the obligation of states to guarantee strong, transparent, and evidence-based public environmental governance.
2. We recognize that Costa Rica’s environmental leadership has been built through robust technical institutions, an extensive network of protected areas, and a culture of conservation that has generated social, economic, and climate benefits. However, we warn of worrying signs of institutional weakening that compromise the country’s real capacity to protect its biodiversity.
3. Between 2020 and 2025, nearly a dozen changes and reform proposals were introduced to the regulatory framework of the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC), aimed at concentrating technical and political competences. At the same time, SINAC has experienced a reduction in its overall budget for the fourth consecutive year, as well as a 60% decrease in the hours dedicated to monitoring and protection activities.
4. These trends take place within a regional context in which environmental crimes converge with transnational illicit economies. In particular, we denounce the advance of narco-degradation: environmental degradation driven by drug trafficking networks and related economies that penetrate territories of high ecological value.
5. We are also concerned about emerging extractivist pressures that could further deepen environmental degradation. A bill currently under legislative consideration would open the door to open-pit metallic mining, representing a break with the political decision that, in 2010, consolidated a national ban on open-pit mining.

For these reasons, IUSY issues a general and urgent call for international solidarity and for the country’s democratic forces to:

6. Halt and prevent high-impact extractivist initiatives, particularly those seeking to reopen open-pit metallic mining, prioritizing development models compatible with the protection of water, forests, biodiversity, and community rights.
7. Protect territory against narco-degradation by strengthening coordination between the state and communities, enhancing the prevention and prosecution of environmental crimes and their financial flows, and safeguarding environmental defenders and local leadership in areas of high ecological value.
8. Strengthen and promote climate action with coherence and ambition, integrating adaptation, conservation, and risk reduction under principles of transparency and accountability, ensuring that climate policy is not weakened by budget cuts, capture, or institutional backsliding.
9. IUSY maintains that the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the expansion of organized crime over territories and common goods are global challenges. Therefore, defending and strengthening environmental governance in Costa Rica is not an isolated local issue, but a concrete contribution to the protection of natural heritage of global importance.