After an early morning and breakfast at the hotel, we began our day with a guided tour around Monteverde’s famous cloud forest! This forest is part of the land that the Quakers worked towards conserving based on the level of biodiversity present. On top of what we learned yesterday about the conservation effort of this forest, today we learned that a whole 2% of the world’s species call Monteverde home and Costa Rica alone accounts for 5% of the biodiversity in the world. To put that statistic in perspective, the entirety of Costa Rica is the size of the state of West Virginia and Monteverde alone has more species of trees than the whole of the United States. This makes Monteverde the best place to learn about the importance of conserving habitats like this in order to protect one of the most impressive parts of the region. 

Unlike what most may think, Costa Rica’s main industry isn’t actually tourism or agriculture. In fact, about 50% of Costa Rica’s foreign investment is into the manufacturing of electronic components. So what does this mean? As we know Costa Rica is a country that stresses the importance of sustainability with 99% of their energy coming from renewable resources. However, the fact that manufacturing is such an important part of their economy is in direct conflict with conservationist efforts like the ones in Monteverde. In order to find the perfect mix between economic productivity and ecological diversity and conservation, evolving their existing sustainability processes is essential.

So in places like Monteverde where conservation is key, they are lacking in the productivity department where their economy relies heavily on tourism. To combat this issue they rely on using sustainable practices like making use of rainwater and composting to contribute to the appeal of their cloud forest. In fact, even in our hotel they make use of a key slot in order to indicate when someone is in the room. When the key card is not there, the electrical circuit is turned off, and it is only turned on once the key card is put in its proper place. Issues and solutions like this are common across Costa Rica as they are always looking for new and more efficient ways to be productive and at the same time conserve their environment. At the end of the day, as the climate all over the world begins to shift, it is important to keep evolving sustainability practices so that countries like Costa Rica can still be productive and conserve energy.