Costa Rica Electricity Institute (ICE) Executive President President Teofilo de la Torre said ICE will resubmit a proposal to segregate 1,000 hectares of Rincón de la Vieja National Park, in the northwestern province of Guanacaste, to reduce the area of exploration and to implement an “eco-design” to minimize impact. The promise aims to accommodate conservationists who have protested the segregation proposal.
The 11,000-hectare Rincón de la Vieja National Park contains the last of the so-called pre-coffee forest habitat in the country, and along with the rest of the Guanacaste Conservation Area, has been declared a “World Heritage Site.”.
“Geothermal is a great opportunity to promote the development of the country based on renewable sources of energy. We nonetheless consider it unnecessary to segregate a national park, a World Heritage Site, without first evaluating the alternatives for developing the project in areas with geothermal potential outside the park using technologies that generate the least negative impact; even if they imply a greater cost, they would generate the conservation of ecosystem services that the forest serves for current and future generations,” UNESCO said in a press release.
Source: TicoTimes.net
