What are we doing?

We deliver on three fronts.

We want Costa Rica to achieve carbon neutrality by 2021.  It is important to us. To do this, we work on three fronts: (1) ensuring the country has a credible roadmap to attain its goal, (2) persuading leaders in business and society to take bold actions, and (3) energizing the general public, particularly young people, to take actions and have their voices heard.  

Everyone in our team shares responsibilities for drafting the report, communicating our results to leaders in business and society, and energizing our peers to action.

Everyone is accountable for carbon reductions.

Each of us is personally committed to creating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; we will likely do so via our own professional and personal endeavors.  However, we also understand that we all need to work on the complex, macro-projects that will give Costa Rica large-scale carbon reductions.  Annually, we will hold our leaders and ourselves accountable for actions and corresponding results.

Our report's conclusions are conversation starters.

A study to determine if Costa Rica can achieve carbon neutrality has never been published. The principal value of our work is to provide the country with a reference point to begin a conversation on our nation's performance on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

Costa Rica will face energy and climate change crises in the coming years, and yet no one has set up metrics to evaluate the country's performance in these sectors.  We want everyone to start talking about these issues in earnest.

Our report is not "the definitive study" for the country.  It has a number of limitations, but we are confident that it provides a clear sense of where the country is going.  We invite skeptics from industry and government to share with us your thoughts, your reports.  We will publish it on this website.  We welcome the conversation.

A few important notes about how we conducted our study:

We focused on the energy sector.

Energy-related emissions are the largest sector (46%) and the most complex to tackle.  Agriculture (38%) has leakage problems and the science for calculating emissions is still being developing. Waste-related emissions (11%) can be addressed with energy-focused solutions.  Mitigation of emissions via reforestation will be considered in our study in order to understand the magnitude of carbon offsetting that is feasible.

We spoke with the experts. 

Therefore, we interviewed over 50 experts across the energy sector, including government officials, academics, financiers, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, NGO heads, etc.  We travelled to all seven provinces to meet with these leaders.  We met with professors in all the major universities.  We tried to engage with all parties that may share a view on a particular technology/policy.  We selected a small group of thought leaders as a “counselors;" they provided guidance and reference during our analysis.

We used official data, facts and plans. 

We obtained data and trends from credible sources in government and industry, locally and internationally.  When data was not readily available, we use proxies and conservative assumptions to make estimations.