Costa Rica raises the bar for addressing agriculture's contribution to climate change
Costa Rica’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG) and its Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) have signed a sectorial agreement to support decarbonizing the country’s agriculture. The move is meant to make the sector resilient to climate changes, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from crops and livestock.
The government is not only setting emissions reduction targets, but also developing strategies that take into account several scenarios that the country might face.
The deal is a result of a participatory process that included government officials, agricultural corporations with high greenhouse gas emissions, non-governmental organizations and representatives from academia. Together, they explored how Costa Rica can make agriculture low-carbon and fight climate change.
The stakeholders involved developed several future scenarios for what the sector might look like in 2030 in the context of climate change, including potential consequences and challenges. They then made recommendations and defined a long-term vision for Costa Rica’s agriculture. Authorities and technical experts from MAG and MINAE used these recommendations to draft their inter-institutional agreement, with support from the United Nations Development Programme.
The scenarios methodology used by Costa Rica’s authorities was developed by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the University of Oxford, and implemented in Central America and the Andes by the University for International Cooperation in collaboration with Utrecht University’s Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development.
For more information on the policy process, please contact Marieke Veeger, scenarios and policy researcher, at mveeger@uci.ac.cr.
