Close to the Nicaraguan border, Los Santos de Upala in Northern Costa Rica is a community where the impact of the climate crisis can be felt with all senses. Frequent periods of drought and heat trigger wildfires that contrast with the merciless precipitation brought by hurricanes.
And the mirrors have disappeared from the face of the earth. “The landscape has changed a thousand percent, I remember as a girl, I could see the water in the cacao plantations – it looked like a mirror on the ground. Now, fifteen years later, there are no more mirrors – everything is dry”, says Andrea Alvarado who works for the local community’s water association (ASADA - Asociación de Acueducto Comunal).
Andrea lives her vocation as a guardian of the water and ensures that the homes and businesses of 34 communities continuously receive the required quality and quantity of potable ground water. “The relationship between forest and water goes beyond a mere friendship. As long as we have standing forests, we will have reliable water sources,” she says, looking at the native Camibar and Espavel trees growing along the riverbed.
Northern Costa Rica is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Research suggests that annual precipitation in this region will be reduced by up to 65 percent until 2080.
Andrea’s colleague, Dina Guzmán, a teacher and volunteer community water manager in the neighboring village of La Cruz, Guanacaste, remembers hurricane Otto which severely hit her community in 2016: "It was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life," Dina recalls. "I climbed on a bed with my children – Sebastián and Damián, 3 and 4 years old at the time – the roof was lifted above our heads, and you could only hear debris flying around. We lost all our belongings. For several days, we had no water, no electricity, no firewood for cooking and no road access – it was very frightening and depressing," says the 32-year-old woman.
The devastation and uncertainty of the moment was accompanied by a glimmer of hope. Thanks to the concerted efforts of all neighbours as well as a project implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Costa Rican Institute of Aqueducts and Sewers (AyA), the local water infrastructure was significantly improved.
To ensure that her children and future generations do not again experience a lack of water, Dina is tirelessly working to transmit her passion to care for the blue gold: "I will do whatever it takes to incorporate water protection awareness and climate change adaptation into the training of students. When I now hear the streams of water flowing across the hills, I feel completely at peace – for me there is nothing like it".
Since the water supply relies on intact forest landscapes, Andrea and Dina are both relieved that they can now benefit from governmental support in reforesting degraded landscapes around their communities. In nine northern cantons, Costa Rica recently launched its international campaign “Footprints for our Future” (“Huella del Futuro”), a fundraising effort which seeks to plant and provide maintenance for 200,000 native trees by September 2021 and to contribute to the country's efforts to increase its forest cover to 60 percent by 2030. Costa Rica's National Fund for Forest Financing (FONAFIFO) and the Environmental Bank Foundation (FUNBAM) are key partners in the process, with technical and financial support from UNDP's Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN).
The initiative particularly focuses on supporting women, who are important land conservation agents but also – due to economic restraints, a lack of land ownership and predominant gender stereotypes – most vulnerable to the direct effects of climate change. Costa Rica seeks to reverse this situation by strengthening the economic autonomy of women and addressing gender gaps in the management of natural resources. In 2019 for instance, it became one of the few countries in the world to prepare a Gender Action Plan (GAP) with funding from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) for its national strategy to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). Developed with civil society organizations, groups of indigenous women, and rural smallholders, the analysis found that many areas with a high percentage of women-owned farms overlap both with areas marked by poverty as well as with priority zones for forest conservation and sustainable management.
Born from these insights, the government initiated the +Women +Nature program, led by the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE), UNDP, and the Office of the First Vice President of the Republic, to increase access to credits and payments for environmental services (PES) for women protecting natural resources, while mitigating the economic impacts generated by COVID-19.
Despite the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic, Costa Rica's efforts to invest into standing forests are still paying off: the country’s REDD+ results-based payments program, supported by UNDP Climate and Forests and funded by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is able to sustain its longstanding payments for environmental services (PES) program. Funded by Costa Rica’s fuel tax and water charge, carbon credits, and strategic alliances with the public and private sector, it directly provides payments to landowners adopting sustainable land-use and forest-management techniques for the environmental services they generate. Since women benefited less from this program in the past years due to lacking landownership, the government now seeks to enhance their access to this scheme.
Looking at the country’s efforts to promote forest conservation and women’s empowerment, even in times of multiple crises, Andrea Alvarado is hopeful: “Let’s go back to believing in the Earth, nature cannot take care of all the disasters that we have created. We have to help her find her way again.”
In the past, Costa Rica already found a way to help the Earth. Describing his homeland, the province of Guanacaste in the north of the country, the famous poet and musician Medardo Guido Acevedo wrote in the late 1980s: “The shattered forest agonizes and with it, the sacred muses of creative inspiration – (…) there are no more melodic trills or colorful flowers, the forest is expiring and with it, the mysterious charm of nature.” Towards the end of the 1990s, thanks to ambitious restoration efforts, the once fire-scarred region Acevedo described rose like a green phoenix from the ashes. It is nowadays known as the Guanacaste Conservation Area and emblematic for the country’s environmental achievements of the past two decades: a fabulously rich landscape of dry forest, cloud forest, and rainforest harboring an exceptional diversity of flora and fauna, including endangered species such as the Central American Tapir or the Mangrove Hummingbird.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the country experienced one of the highest rates of deforestation worldwide. “I spent my youth working in the fields, and before, there were only cattle pastures here. Whenever we saw a forest, we chopped it down, set it on fire and burnt it to the ground,” Maria Guillermina Aleman Carillo, a farmer from Santa Rosa remembers. Deforestation was mainly driven by ecologically harmful policy incentives including easily accessible credits for cattle, land-titling laws that rewarded deforestation, and rapid expansion of the road system.
These detrimental mechanisms have since been replaced by visionary political leadership and strong environmental policies continuously involving stakeholders – especially women and indigenous communities. Farmers like Maria Guillermina can now benefit from economic incentives to conserve forests or restore their degraded lands, for instance in the form of a governmental loan to conduct high-impact reforestation projects.
Today, forest cover in Costa Rica reaches 52 percent of the national territory. Yet, Yarely Diaz Gomez, who works as a forest brigade in Arenal, knows there is still work left to protect these forests: “There aren’t a lot of jobs in rural areas. Our forests suffer from fires, poachers, and deforestation. We need to invest more in projects that promote reforestation, the local economy and especially women – and this not only consists in planting trees. It goes beyond – we must give these tender seedlings all the care we can and monitor them until they bring flowers and fruits. Only then is it a real win, for us and for the Earth.”
Strengthening Capacities of Rural Aquaduct Associations (ASADAS) to Address Climate Change Risk in Water Stressed Communities in Northern Costa Rica is supported by UNDP's Climate Change Adaptation Program and financed by Special Climate Change Fund of the Global Environment Facility.
Footprints for Our Future is supported by UNDP's Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN).
Costa Rica’s REDD+ Results-Based Payments Project, supported by UNDP Climate & Forests Program and financed by Green Climate Fund's pilot program on results-based payments for REDD+.
© 2026 Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) en América Latina y el Caribe
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