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Water will flow: Pipes that will be used for the controversial Sardinal Aqueduct Project, the construction of which can go forward after developers received a green light from environment officials, who asserted there is enough water in Sardinal's aquifer to support the project. |
Ronald Reyes | Tico Times |
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Glowing heritage: A display at the Gold Museum in San José lights up the faces of schoolchildren, a few of the 35 students from the Zapatón Indigenous School in the indigenous Huetar community near La Cangreja National Park, west of San José, who woke up before dawn Monday for an excursion to the capital. |
| Nick Coté | Tico Times |
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| Newsflash: Nicaragua back on board for Central America-EU talks |
| Nicaragua has confirmed its return to EU and Central American trade negotiations this week in Brussels, the newswire DPA reported. |
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| Controversial Costa Rica water project gets green light |
| The controversial Sardinal Aqueduct Project in Guanacaste, a province northwest of San José, has been approved by the Environment, Energy and Telecommunications Ministry (MINAET). |
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| Argentina’s Los Fabulosos Cadillacs to roll into Costa Rica |
| Following a more than six-year hiatus, Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs are on a reunion tour, and have chosen Costa Rica for their only Central America stop-off. |
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| Costa Ricans save under Oscar Arias |
| On his way to the fifth Summit of the Americas, the Costa Rican president's commercial flight was grounded in Panama, as airspace was restricted to leaders jetting in on private flights. |
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| Our Unsung Hero: Tropical Marine Bioproductivity |
Costa Rica's bio diversity has reached world consciousness and achieved fame and fortune. But do you know about this country's unsung hero, bioproductivity? While our forests boast a renowned terrestrial biodiversity rivaling any similar-sized area in the world, our oceans' surface waters, coasts and islands are not particularly high in marine biodiversity. |
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Newsflash: Nicaragua back
on board for Central America-EU talks |
By Vanessa I. Garnica
Tico Times Staff | vgarnica@ticotimes.net |
| Nicaragua has confirmed its return to EU and Central American trade negotiations this week in Brussels, the newswire DPA reported.
“We are very pleased with Nicaragua's decision to come back to the negotiations,” Emma Lizano, spokeswoman for the Costa Rican Foreign Trade Ministry (COMEX) told The Tico Times Monday night.
Manuel Coronel, vice minister of foreign relations for Nicaragua, told reporters on Monday that he will travel to Belgium this week for a meeting to discuss the future of the negotiations.
The big news comes after weeks of speculation regarding the nation's role in the upcoming round after the Managua delegation walked away from t he last meeting, which took place in Honduras the week of March 30.
The Nicaraguans proposed a cooperation fund of €60 billion ($79 billion) during the last round without the consensus of the other four Central American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
According to Coronel, during the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago all of the leaders from the Central American nations agreed to the creation of such a fund, but added there are details that still need to be studied. |
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Controversial Costa Rica
water project gets green light |
By Mike McDonald
Tico Times Staff | mmcdonald@ticotimes.net |
The controversial Sardinal Aqueduct Project in Guanacaste, a province northwest of San José, has been approved by the Environment, Energy and Telecommunications Ministry (MINAET).
Environment authorities gave the project the green light last week after a final report on the area's resources confirmed the existence of sufficient water to operate the aqueduct.
According to the report, the aquifer from where the aqueduct would draw its water has the ability to produce 371.75 liters of water (98.1 gallons) per second.
Residents and environmental groups worry the project will lead to over-exploitation of water in the area, drawing it to feed coastal construction in northern Guanacaste, but officials from the Costa Rican Water and Sewer Institute (AyA) said they will monitor the aqueduct closely to ensure that water is not overused.
“We worked very closely with various assessment organizations to make sure we don't harm the area,” said Grettel Corrales, an AyA press officer.
A ruling by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court (Sala IV) halted construction of the aquifer on Jan. 14 because the project's developers could not verify the aquifer contained enough water to begin extraction.
The report recommended the creation of an Extraction Monitoring Plan to help supervise the use of the aquifer over the course of the next two years. Officials from MINAET, AyA and representatives from the Carrillo Municipality are organized under the plan. |
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Argentina’s Los Fabulosos
Cadillacs to roll into Costa Rica |
By Alex Leff
Tico Times Staff | aleff@ticotimes.net |
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Porteño posse: Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs are back with some new tracks off their recently released “La Luz del Ritmo.” |
Photo courtesy of Evenpro |
Following a more than six-year hiatus, Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs are on a reunion tour, and have chosen Costa Rica for their only Central America stop-off.
Their Satánico Pop Tour 2009 is set to hit a still undetermined venue here on May 26, the concert promoter Evenpro said Monday in a press release.
Formed in Buenos Aires in 1985, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs are famous across the Spanish speaking world for their raw, energetic mix of Latin punk rock, pumping percussions and a blaring ska horn section, immortalized in the classic hit “Matador.”
The band reformed last year and recorded five new songs, six re-makes and two covers for the album “La Luz del Ritmo.”
For more information on the group and the tour, visit the Web site http://www.fabulosos-cadillacs.com. |
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| Costa Ricans save under Oscar Arias |
By Chrissie Long
Tico Times Staff | clong@ticotimes.net |
On his way to the fifth Summit of the Americas, the Costa Rican president's commercial flight was grounded in Panama, as airspace was restricted to leaders jetting in on private flights.
Though Oscar Arias and the rest of his delegation arrived on time for the opening ceremony, they spent several hours waiting for the airspace to re-open for commercial planes.
According to a press release from his office, airfare is not the only place Costa Ricans are saving money under the Arias administration. Their president receives one of the smallest salaries among heads of state of North and Central American countries at $84,000 a year, Univisión reported.
The only presidents paid less are El Salvadoran President Elías Antonio Saca and Hondoras President Manuel Zelaya, who both receive $60,000 a year.
And not only are Costa Ricans paying the least for their president's salary, but Arias is reinvesting his income in foundations and organizations that serve his country's needy.
According to numbers provided by Univision television, U.S. President Barack Obama is the highest paid top official with $396,000, followed by Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, who receives $222,000.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón gets $156,000, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega is paid $126,000 and Panama President Martín Torrijos received the same pay as President Arias at $84,000. |
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| Our Unsung Hero: Tropical Marine Bioproductivity |
Costa Rica's bio diversity has reached world consciousness and achieved fame and fortune. But do you know about this country's unsung hero, bioproductivity? While our forests boast a renowned terrestrial biodiversity rivaling any similar-sized area in the world, our oceans' surface waters, coasts and islands are not particularly high in marine biodiversity. The unexplored deep sea bottoms might hold world-class biodiversity, but we do not know yet. What we do have is perhaps the world's highest tropical marine bioproductivity. And bioproductivity is just as cool as biodiversity.
While other places boast tens of thousands more marine species than Costa Rica's ocean area, our high marine bioproductivity means that we have tens of thousands more animals in a given area, just of fewer species. Imagine 100 beautiful masked booby seabirds, then 1,000 frolicking spinner dolphins, with 10,000 rocketing yellowfin tuna below and 50,000 Audubon's shearwaters and brown boobies whirling and swooping above. Throw in 500,000 shimmering rainbow comb jelly plankton and a few million finger-sized lantern fish forming shape-changing bait balls. Not so many species, but a lot of animals. That's bioproductivity, and it's a unique quality of Costa Rica's Pacific.
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| Strength in Numbers: Spinner dolphins congregate by the thousands off the Osa Peninsula. High bioproductivity is a unique feature of these Pacific waters. |
Shawn Larkin | Tico Times |
This doesn't mean the nation's coral reefs are not wonderfully biodiverse ecosystems; they are, but they are nowhere near the most biodiverse in the world. The Indo-Pacific contains probably tens of thousands more marine species than Costa Rica's Pacific. Take our coral, for example: Our Pacific surface waters have just a few dominant species of corals, with about 30 or 40 species total, and most places covered with fewer than 10 species. Costa Rica's Caribbean grows perhaps 80 species of coral in coastal waters, more than twice as biodiverse as the west coast. But waters in Indonesia explode with hundreds or even thousands of coral species. The story is the same for shellfish, algae, starfish and urchins, sea cucumbers, sea grass, sponges, fish and others. Simply put, the Indo-Pacific has the world's greatest known marine biodiversity.
One indicator used by ocean hunters, naturalists and scientists to gauge marine bioproductivity is birds. The more birds you see, the greater the bioproductivity. Thousands of birds would not be flying over a slice of ocean without a reason, and the reason is food: small fish, crustaceans, plankton and other marine life that abound in and define productive waters.
Flying offshore of southwestern Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, you can see congregations of more seabirds than seems possible to count, indicating that the marine bioproductivity must be off the scale. Large numbers of other top predators such as dolphins, tuna and commercial, sport and artisan fishers also act as flags to high bioproductivity and confirm a Costa Rican natural treasure: world-class tropical marine bioproductivity.
The Americas' equivalent in terrestrial bioproductivity may have once been the North American great plains, where roamed vast herds of buffalo, deer and antelope, with sky-darkening clouds of Carolina parakeets covering whole states, plenty of bears, wild cats, beavers, otters and mink mixed throughout. Birds of prey such as eagles and hawks were so common that many people made clothes out of their feathers. Of course, now these ecosystems are more the stuff of song and legend than reality.
Costa Rica is blessed with living, intact, astounding bioproductivity that you can see on a day trip in a boat. Vast pods of dolphins stretching out of sight, flocks of seabirds darkening the sky and fish clouding the sea. This ecosystem is as wonderful a natural attraction as anything in Costa Rica, a true world marvel, yet few besides fishermen know it. Though very underdeveloped here, pelagic or open-ocean tourism holds great potential, as an infrastructure of boats and facilities is already in place. The high bioproductivity could soon lead to greater human economic productivity, if the resource is managed well.
Luckily, there is still time to sing praises and perpetuate some of the world's greatest tropical marine bioproductivity.
Contact Shawn at 8835-6041 or shawndive@yahoo.com, or check out www.costacetacea.com, updated weekly.
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