Forest cover, development, and sustainability in Costa Rica: Can one policy fit all?

- Forest cover change is mapped between 1986 and 2014, demonstrating an overall increase in forest cover across the study area.
- An ordinary least squares regression on farm parcels reveals drivers of forest cover change.
- A GWR assesses the variation in drivers of forest cover change and points to farm abandonment as linked to forest regrowth.
- Interview data links forest cover change to development policy in the region and other indicators of sustainability.
- Data indicate that though forest has regrown across the study area, development patterns raise new problems for long-term sustainability.

Forest Transition Theory offers the hope that global economic development can continue in tandem with forest recovery. Costa Rica has been lauded for its successful forest transition-once the fastest deforesting country in Central America, forests began to regrow in the 1980s and have had a steady trajectory of recovery since. This forest regrowth can be linked temporally to Costa Rican policies that have promoted tourism and discouraged small-scale agriculture. We use a case study from the Bellbird Biological Corridor (Corredor Biológico Pájaro Campana; CBPC), Costa Rica, combining remote sensing analysis with interviews and ethnography, to unravel the relationship between national policy, forest regrowth, and social-ecological sustainability. The forest cover change analysis between 1986 and 2014 indicates that, at the parcel-level, national policy has served to promote farm abandonment in favor of tourism and that this change has been critical to forest regrowth. However, these changes have occurred within a development framework that has created new social-ecological challenges that threaten future forest and economic sustainability. Examining the parcel-level impacts of the driving forces of landscape change highlights that forest cover is an insufficient proxy for conservation success, and conservation policy focused primarily on forest recovery may create new sustainability challenges.