We asked Dan Janzen, President of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, how they identify the people who currently own the rainforest that they purchase for conservation. See what he has to say.

The land purchases (more than 300 in the history of the formation of ACG, and see the GDFCF site for the specific example of Rincon Rainforest) are extremely varied in their nature and ownerships. The owners range from original frontier colonists to middle-class absentee landlords to wealthy corporations to foreign investors, and about every imaginable combination and in-between. They all have one trait – they are happy to sell their land for something approximating market value in order to buy something ‘better’ – land, store, delivery truck, investment bonds, vacation in Europe, relative support, and about everything else you can think of. This move “up” is their personal evaluation of their situation.

Another variable that has been important has been the occasional case, usually with long-time resident families, of “I am happy to sell it for inclusion in a national park” (with the silent implication of I would not sell it to a developer or THAT neighbor).

The actual process of land purchase is sociologically complex, but boils down to what any neighbor does if he wants to buy the neighbors farm. You talk, think, discuss, offer, counteroffer, etc. for weeks to months to years, and in the end, it is commonplace for the fund transfer to be in portions (because ACG and GDFCF does not have enough donor funds to buy the entire property outright) and to allow 6 months to a year for removal of livestock resident on parts of the property.

Almost always we purchase an entire property, because the person has long since moved off the land and simply wishes to cash in and use the funds elsewhere. All properties purchased are surveyed (for area and location), titled, and registered in the national land register, and owned by the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (a US and Costa Rican registered charity) until passed as a “finished” ACG Sector to the government (in the meantime they are managed jointly by GDFCF and ACG).

As for what appear to be high land prices, one has to remember that Costa Rica, for all its low financial resources, very much approximates a developed country in terms of goods, services, health, education, government stability, and land ownership. Ask yourself what a hectare of old growth forest on private land a two hour drive from an international airport in UK or California would cost, and then the Sector A land prices are bargain basement (and climbing yet more rapidly as agro-industry becomes the major competitor and yet another road is paved).

But with this greater cost also comes enormously greater social stability for the purchase and its permanent incorporation into national park status. In those countries where tropical forest can still be purchased for a quarter to half the cost of Sector A lands, the management and stress costs, both in dollars and sweat equity, will have to yet be paid over the years to come. In Costa Rica they have already been paid.

So how do people come to own large tracts of rainforest?

If the owner is international, they bought it from a Costa Rican, almost invariably. The Costa Rican who owns it today bought it from someone else, and all the land around here (Rincon Forest) is owned by a historical chain containing 5-10 owners back to colonial times. ACG contains the second oldest European ranch in Costa Rica, established about 1580. Think on that date. There have been 40+ owners for Santa Rosa since then. The specific Sector A area was initially a few huge land holdings obtained by colonists in the 1800′s and early 1900′s as part of government programs for rural development, and these have gradually been fractured and sold off in parcels as they were also (often) logged or otherwise converted to agroscape, where they are now. The indigenous holdings here vaporized with the first several hundred years of European occupation.

Dan Janzen has sent us an image he has taken of a Male day-flying moth Xanthocastnia evalthe in the family Castniidae, about 2 inch wingspan.

The Sector A work is currently looking for funding to extend the forest North and protect this area of rainforest for ever.

CTF is running a campaign to raise funds for the GDFCF work. We plan to raise £50,000 to help purchase this incredibly diverse habitat. The importance of this habitat is underlined by Dans comment on the picture he sent to us.

I attach an image of a day-flying large moth that I took in May on a property 14a in Sector A. It is Xanthocastnia evalthe (Castniidae) and this is the first one I have ever seen alive.

GDFCF have identified the owners of the land and they have all agreed to sell, we need to raise the funds to get the down payments made. Property 14a that Dan mentions above is 55 hectares and requires approximately $150,000 to purchase. You can see it in the map below.

If you you would like to help, use the donation button at the top of this page.

The Rincon Rainforest is a 5,600 hectare forest situated in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica. And it’s been saved! Through the efforts of GDFCF, run by Dan and Winnie Janzen and the donations from individuals and organisations like CTF, the land has been purchased from its owners and saved forever.

The new target is now north of the Rincon Rainforest, and it’s called Sector A. Hot the tags at the bottom of this post for Sector A information.

The Rincon Forest conservation is a real success story for land purchase operations and CTF is proud to have supported the GDFCF with funds for many years. The best place to read the story and history of the Rincon Rainforest work is on the pages of the GDFCF website, a fantastic repository of rainforest information.

What is the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG)?

The ACG is 110,000 terrestrial hectares and 43,000 marine hectares of permanently conserved government-owned wildlands in northwestern Costa Rica. It began in 1971 as the 10,400 ha Parque Nacional Santa Rosa, a national monument and tropical dry forest national park. This conservation unit began to expand in 1986 to restore and conserve an entire tropical dry forest ecosystem. Today the ACG is a single biophysical unit about 90 km long, stretching from 17 km out in the Pacific Ocean to the east in the foothills of the Caribbean coastal plains. It contains about 235,000 species in its dry forest, cloud forest and rain forest, and the intergrades between these major ecosystems. This is roughly 2.4% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, or 60% of the species that occur in Costa Rica. It is also more species than occur in the continental USA. The ACG was decreed a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) on 2 December 1999, and the definition is written such that any additions to it are automatically part WHS.

The ACG links the highlands of Costa Rica, the established Reserve of Santa Rosa in the Pacific lowlands with the National Parks of Guanacaste and Rincon de la Vieja. This provides a continuous bridge or corridor of forest from the Pacific lowland dry gallery forest to the highland cloud forests.

Such a corridor is considered vitally important in this narrow neck of Central America both for long distance bird immigrants, and for altitudinal migration of birds, mammals and insects.

The original area of forest denoted as the Rincon Rainforest has now been saved thanks the donations from around the world from individuals and organisations alike. However, north of the Rincon Rainforest is an area designated as Sector A. Sector A is now the target for GDFCF, click the Sector A tag below this post or in the tag cloud on the right.

A quote from Dan Janzen, the President of GDFCF…

We are the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (I am the President, my wife Dr. Winnie Hallwachs is the secretary and treasurer, and it is a US registered 501.c.3 It is also a registered NGO in Costa Rica, the NGO for Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (163,000 ha, 2% of Costa Rica; 2.6% of the world’s species, and real conservation into perpetuity). GDFCF currently owns 13,000 ha of ACG forest all purchased with donations, and all eventually to be given to the government, but currently simply managed by the government (by the ACG staff). The project is to obtain all the forest portions remaining around the margins of ACG, to make it as large and climate-robust as humanly possible, and endow all of the ACG (which currently has only an endowment of $6 m but we are working on it).

The best place to find out about the Rincon Rainforest is on Dan & Winnie Janzens website. These guys have been running the organisation who have aggregated all the donations from around the world to save this rainforest. And they have done it. 5600 hectares of endangered tropical rainforest in Costa Rica is now saved into perpetuity.

The way it works is this. Organisations like ourselves raise funds and then chose where to deploy these funds so kindly gifted to us by people like yourself! One of the projects we have given to over the years is the work Dan & Winnie do with their organisation the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF).

GDFCF take the funds we and others raise and purchase land with it. They identify the land owners, approach them and purchase the land. They purchase the land in the Rincon Forest, just one of the many sectors in the ACG, and then turn it over to the Area Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG), a government national parks organisation. There is no overhead on the donations, neither CTF (UK) or GDFCF take any administration costs out of your donation. The fact of the matter is, every penny goes to land purchase and all the work is carried out pro bono. If you’d like to help us in some way, click the Get Involved link above!

So if Rincon Forest is saved, then what next?

North of the Rincon Forest, within the ACG, is an area designated as Sector A. Sector A is the target now. To find out more about Sector A and our appeal to raise funds, hit a Sector A tag at the bottom of this post or in the tag cloud on the right.