
How did a Central American country smaller than West Virginia go from one of the worst deforestation rates on Earth in the 1980s to doubling its forest cover in a single generation?
Costa Rica's forest cover collapsed to around 25 percent in the 1980s, then doubled to nearly 60 percent by the 2020s. The mechanism has a name, a launch date, and a funding source — a 1996 payments programme bankrolled by a fuel tax.







