During the commemoration of National Tree Day in Costa Rica, the State of the Nation Report points out the that the country has taken a leading position in the region when it comes to forest cover recovery, however, many challenges still lay ahead.

By putting into practice different legal restrictions such as the prohibition to modify the use of land; incentives like the payment for environmental services as well as combined efforts for the protection of forests and diminishing of the area used for livestock, the country has managed to revert the process of forest loss.

However, although the general balance in forest recovery is positive, the main challenge the country faces is to guarantee the sustainability of these advances when faced with new threats that come along with patterns of land occupation.

One of the main areas of concern is Guanacaste, a province that went from a total forest cover of 51% in 2005 to 60% in 2015; however, it has lost 63,650 hectares of forest, mainly because of the use of land for grazing and farming products.

Other threats include forest fires which in 2016 registered the largest number of hectares affected in the last 15 years (56,139), out of which 6,271 hectares were part of wildlife protected areas. Forests are also vulnerable to natural disasters such as landslides and earthquakes as well as many other extreme meteorological events.

The expansion of certain agricultural products such as pineapple that went from 11,000 to 58,000 hectares between 2000 and 2015 also contributes to the loss of forest cover.

In addition, concerns are starting to rise in Central America with regards to “narco-deforestation” , cocaine trade contributing to deforestation.