Aiming for Net Zero: Costa Rica’s Green Elite and the Struggle to Mitigate Climate Change By Julia A. Flagg
Author(s): Julia A. Flagg
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2024
Language: English
ISBN: 026254976X, 9780262549769
Pages : 241
How Costa Rican officials implemented policies to minimize climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, and what other countries can learn from them.
As atmospheric greenhouse gasses continue to rise, there has never been a greater need for emission-reduction programs. Costa Rica, a small Central American country, is one of the few that has committed to ambitious emission reduction goals. Its pioneering policies include a Payments for Environmental Services program, a carbon neutrality promise, and a goal of decarbonizing the economy. Julia Flagg’s book, Aiming for Net Zero, investigates why Costa Rican politicians have chosen more climate mitigation policies than leaders from other countries, as well as how these policies were introduced and developed.
Flagg narrates the story of Costa Rica’s climate mitigation policy evolution using archival material and interviews with three dozen people who have contributed to climate policy in the country between 2013 and 2021. Costa Rica’s historically egalitarian class structure and interconnected, green-minded urban elite, she writes, prioritized investment in public welfare as a means of enhancing national development, resulting in the advancement of climate mitigation policies during four historical periods: the late 1980s, the mid-1990s, the mid-2000s, and the late 2010s.
Aiming for Net Zero provides several lessons for other countries attempting to reduce global warming emissions. It demonstrates how investments in the public good boost socioeconomic development, allowing state planners to undertake ambitious climate mitigation measures.