Making Mangrove Pay | Costa Rica News
On the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, the Osa Peninsula sticks out like a gigantic thumb pointing down toward Panama. Inside this thumb live pumas and scarlet macaws, harpy eagles and jaguars. Sail north from this rainforest a few miles and you’ll arrive at the Térraba-Sierpe National Wetlands, the largest mangrove forest in Central America. Here eight species of mangrove trees — like wooden rope-work tying together a maze of swamps and rivers — stretch over some 66,000 acres.
“It’s one of Costa Rica’s best preserved wilderness areas,” says the University of Vermont’s Azur Moulaert. A place of nearly inaccessible beauty, it also provides at least $300 million each year in value, he says, “and maybe a billion or more,” in the form of ecosystem services like hurricane protection, commercial mussel habitat, clean water, healthy fisheries, tourist-attracting birds and carbon sequestration.
On the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, the Osa Peninsula sticks out like a gigantic thumb pointing down toward Panama. Inside this thumb live pumas and scarlet macaws, harpy eagles and jaguars. Sail north from this rainforest a few miles and you’ll arrive at the Térraba-Sierpe National Wetlands, the largest mangrove forest in Central America. Here eight species of mangrove trees — like wooden rope-work tying together a maze of swamps and rivers — stretch over some 66,000 acres.
“It’s one of Costa Rica’s best preserved wilderness areas,” says the University of Vermont’s Azur Moulaert. A place of nearly inaccessible beauty, it also provides at least $300 million each year in value, he says, “and maybe a billion or more,” in the form of ecosystem services like hurricane protection, commercial mussel habitat, clean water, healthy fisheries, tourist-attracting birds and carbon sequestration.
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