Members of the Environment Tribunal (TAA) held a press conference this week announcing the results of a recent sweep of investigations the tribunal carried out in the areas in and around the Southern Zone’s Térraba-Sierpe National Wetlands.
They found farmers draining mangrove swamps and wetlands, shrinking lakes, waterways polluted with farming chemicals and a live caiman trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey with its legs twisted around and tied behind its back. Someone, the tribunal suspected, was planning on eating it.
But environmental degradation and reptilian bondage games weren’t the only things on tribunal members’ minds. After detailing the 16 most recent cases the tribunal, which is the investigatory body under the Environment, Energy and Telecommunications Ministry, has investigated, members also revealed that the TAA’s projected budgetary allotment for 2012 is about ₡113 million ($223,500) less than the almost ₡188 million ($372,000) the tribunal had asked for – a whopping 60 percent reduction. That leaves the group tasked with investigating cases of environmental transgressions a little more than ₡74 million ($146,000) to carry out its obligations across the country.
Since 2008, the TAA has put the kibosh on more than 63 building developments that were found to be harming environmentally sensitive areas.
Under the proposed budget for 2012, the group is allotted exactly $0 to pay insurance deductibles on its vehicles. Not that it matters much if the tribunal will be able to afford insurance on said vehicles – the Finance Ministry allotted the group a big fat goose egg for repair and maintenance to keep its vehicles on the road.
Remember the scene in Stephen King’s chiller, “Pet Sematary,” where the dead kid pops out from under the bed and slices the unsuspecting neighbor’s Achilles tendon with a scalpel?
The TAA is squirming around on the floor now. If it can’t get up and get out to do its job, nobody else will. That means that areas like the Térraba-Sierpe National Wetlands or the Caño Negro Wetlands near the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border in the Northern Zone will be left without an advocate.
Already the tribunal is overstretched, with only 19 representatives to execute investigations and file complaints across the entire country. It is impossible for the group to locate and investigate every environmental transgression. But with no budget for vehicle maintenance or insurance deductibles to make their vehicles street-legal, the tribunal won’t have the capacity to venture beyond the barrios of San José.
Navel gazing is one thing – and there are certainly plenty of environmental travesties to be found in the Central Valley – but can a country that hosts 2 million tourists a year and pulls 12 percent of its gross domestic product from tourism, much of that predicated on the continuing existence of pristine natural landscapes, afford to hobble the regulatory agency that protects those landscapes?
Absolutely not.
The Finance Ministry has to find the cash to keep the TAA on the move because tourism dollars, just like wetlands, can dry up fast.
