Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, GEF CEO and Chairperson, spoke at a TEDxPuraVida event in San Jose, Costa Rica in April 2024.
The video is in Spanish, with an English transcript below.
English Transcript
This is an extraordinarily beautiful, beautiful image of Costa Rica. It is Tortuguero National Park, one of the places with the greatest plant and animal diversity on planet Earth. This national park was created in 1970. And this photograph that you see was also taken in 1970. And that little kid with that mop of hair, it’s me, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, when I was 11 years old.
And when I consider that I’m now 64 years old, I had my 64th birthday two days ago, and between 1970 and today, not only did I lose all my hair, my thick head of hair, but the planet has also lost 69 percent of its plant and animal populations. Today, after 35, 40 years of a professional career in nature conservation, I am honored to be the CEO of the Global Environment Facility.
This organization works to finance conservation actions in 144 countries. We have a portfolio of 2,000 projects and a budget of $8.4 billion. As the head of this global fund, I am constantly exposed, at all times, to the best scientific information. And the fact that I’m exposed to science and innovation gives me the authority to address everyone here about the need for us to pursue the route towards bio-prosperity.
As I said earlier, scientific studies have shown that we have lost 69 percent of the planet’s plant and animal populations. That means that when they took that picture of me in 1970, there were two million African elephants. Today, barely 50,000 of them remain. What’s more, there’s a very interesting study that indicates that if we took all the mammals on the planet and put them together in one place, 94 percent of them would be human beings, horses, cows, cats, dogs, and domestic animals.
Photo credit: rahona.photo/TEDx
And only six percent of the mammals on the planet are wild animals, whales, jaguars, tapirs, tigers. And speaking of biodiversity, the goal is to halt and reverse the loss of flora and fauna by 2030. And from the year 2030 onwards, on the basis of clearly defined initiatives, begin to recover populations of flora and fauna. We call that being nature positive.
Today, the vast majority of the world’s countries, with few exceptions, are nature-negative countries, and all industrialized and rich countries are part of the movement to become nature-positive countries. There are five or six countries that, historically for different reasons, have been moving towards the nature-positive goal. And Costa Rica is one of them. Costa Rica, Bhutan, Suriname, Guyana, Gabon, middle-income countries and poor countries, are all moving toward that 2030 target of becoming nature positive.
And without a doubt, this great framework agreement for survival is strongly based on the Costa Rican experience, an experience that offers us great possibilities for moving toward this paradigm of bio-prosperity. There are four main objectives of this great Global Biodiversity Framework and in all four I can see, you can see the evidence of Costa Rica’s influence on global decisions.
This is incredible. This is wonderful. When the Paris Agreement was negotiated, Costa Rica was less prominent than others that were seated at the table for these multilateral negotiations. However, in this agreement, on biodiversity, Costa Rica’s voice was not only respected, but the evidence and data that showed Costa Rica moving toward the nature-positive goal were extremely influential.
And this Framework Agreement outlines four fundamental objectives to be achieved by the year 2030. Number one is to protect and preserve 30 percent of oceans and terrestrial ecosystems by the year 2030. A complex and difficult task for many countries. And don’t think that I’m referring here to developing countries. Think of the United States, Canada, Germany and Japan, which lag very far behind many developing countries, including Costa Rica.
They aspire to protect 30 percent of their national territory by 2030, while Costa Rica today has already protected 65 percent of its territory with some kind of conservation plan. Thirty percent is dedicated to national parks or protected areas, while the other 25 percent or so are managed under innovative regimes, where private conservation is carried out, where tourism combined with payments for environmental services makes it more profitable to keep forests and restore degraded areas than to rear cows, cultivate coffee, or engage in other traditional activities.
The second of the four major objectives is the restoration of the planet’s degraded areas. Some two billion parcels of land, fields, and landscapes are tremendously degraded and can no longer be used to produce goods and services, particularly in agriculture. And the goal is to restore those areas. A new, complex, difficult, and expensive operation. And guess what? Costa Rica’s experience is the blueprint to be followed.
Costa Rica lost its forests in the 1960s and 1970s. Today we have twice as many forests, and that can be attributed to restoration, and to restoration only. And restoration can be achieved in many ways, such as the examples of Germany, Finland, Norway, Japan, and the United States, which focus on planting trees. It is a type of regeneration that is low in ecosystem services.
Regeneration in Costa Rica is rich in biological diversity. Today, we see tapirs and jaguars when, 40 or 100 years ago, none were seen. The restoration that we implemented in Costa Rica is of high quality. The third issue, and possibly the most complex of all, is how to make productive activities greener and to minimize their environmental impact. And today, Costa Rica can’t, it can’t afford to let its guard down, because the task is both huge and complex.
Five sectors are considered the leading sources of biodiversity loss on the planet. These include the agricultural sector and the fisheries sector. And before continuing, allow me a brief digression. Lest anyone should doubt, there is absolutely no way to make trawling sustainable, the so-called sustainable trawling promoted in this country. It’s like saying let’s do sustainable deforestation.
I mean, there are lines. Surely, we should let the science and the technology decide, and fishing is one of the many activities that must be eliminated. And that doesn’t mean condemning people to poverty. So then, the fisheries sector is the sector with the second highest impact on biodiversity. The third is infrastructure – cities, roads, ports, dams, hydropower.
The third relates to forestry activities, all of which are irrational, and the fourth refers to the extractive industries, mainly oil and gas and mining. We need to see how we can set clear rules for what’s acceptable and what’s not, and certainly trawling with nets is one activity that’s not acceptable. We need to go green from the beginning. And to achieve this, we have to have the necessary incentives framework and stimuli to make that work.
Photo credit: rahona.photo/TEDx
Objective 4 of the Global Biodiversity Framework has to do with financing. Countries have pledged to mobilize $200 billion by the year 2030. You should all be aware that this involves both rich and poor countries. Middle-income countries mobilize $80 billion. So, the big question is how do we close the financial gap between $80 billion and $200 billion?
And guess what? Once again, Costa Rica is held up as an example, because the traditional approach to closing the financial gap is to impose more taxes on the public in order to finance conservation initiatives, right? Costa Rica has proven over the decades to be very innovative in the design of different and alternative mechanisms that can be used to finance the conservation agenda.
The implementation of payments for environmental services is, without a doubt and by far, the best example of such a mechanism. These four objectives together constitute what I call the road to bio-prosperity and as a Costa Rican and negotiator of these international agreements, I am tremendously proud of the influence that our country has had on a global issue of this magnitude. With my dad, I never saw a jaguar or a tapir or a whale, but only because there weren’t any in this country.
But with my children, I have been able to see whales, jaguars, and tapirs, proving that we are making progress and moving forward. And this, without a doubt, is due to a generation, to my generation, where some rebellious, irreverent, idealistic young people like me began to question the system, the system of public policy, agrarian reform, and land tenure, and to help landless peasant farmers and definitely, to confront deforestation.
We were constantly told that what we were attempting was impossible, that it could not be achieved. What’s more, I myself believed this to be the case. I used to live in the southern zone and in San Carlos, and the level of deforestation was so great that my highest aspiration was just to protect some patches of forest that could serve as national parks, forming islands in a sea of productive and rational activities. And I kept at it.
And it seems inconceivable that I’m here today talking about a country that stopped deforestation, doubled its forest cover. It’s the only country in the world that operates in harmony with nature, at one with nature, in a nature-positive way, when this is a medium-term objective for over 200 countries around the world. I believe that this is a great legacy of my generation, and it’s a legacy that all of you have to appreciate and assume responsibility for.
Today, I can look my children in the eye and feel satisfied that we have accomplished some of what we set out to do. I hope that all of you may also look your children in the eye and feel satisfied with the efforts you have made to bring about the green development of this very special country that we have. Thank you so much to all of you.
