If you’re looking to talk to Costa Rica’s newly appointed environment
minister, you won’t find him in the halls of government buildings,
court offices or mega-corporations that his predecessors came from.
Instead, you will find Dr. Edgar Gutiérrez in his closet-sized office in
the statistics department at the University of Costa Rica.
Foto cortesía UCR
A UCR professor and researcher since 1994, Gutiérrez has a background
in science, not politics. He has a doctorate in forest biometry from
Iowa State University. He was the brain behind the country’s current
National Environmental Strategy report. He drives a car that runs on
hydrogen.
All of these things make him an unlikely government minister, and he knows it.
“I don’t want to be environment minister,” he said shaking his head
as we sat down at students’ desks in a classroom for the interview.
This may be true, but as we rolled through the questions, his
intentions for his new post became clear. Gutiérrez may not want to be
the environment minister, but he does want to change Costa Rica.
TT: Why did you accept the appointment as minister?
EG: Honestly, this is a huge opportunity. This is a window that will
let me do what I always believed we could do in this country. I believe that when Costa Ricans cast their votes for Luis Guillermo
Solís they created an opportunity to put the country on a path that
seeks the well-being of everyone and not just certain groups of people.
It put us on a path that seeks development, but only development
permitted by the Costa Rican Constitution; development in a healthy
environment.
Constitutionally, Costa Rica does not want whatever kind of
development comes along. Costa Rica wants fair development created
without polluting the environment. Extractive industries like petroleum
and open-pit mining have no place here. I want to create a Costa Rica
that attracts sustainable development that maximizes the benefits for
our communities.
Your professional background is in science and academia rather
than politics. How is this going to drive your actions as minister?
It’s true. My educational background is in forest biometry, but I
have always been involved with environmental public policy. I directed
the first and second United Nations reports on the environment for Latin
America and the Caribbean and the first for Costa Rica, and I served as
a volunteer adviser under three previous environment ministers (René
Castro, Elizabeth Odio and Carlos Manuel Rodríguez). I also was the
director of the National Environmental Strategy report for 2005-2020.
None of these politicians asked me to come work for free. I offered
because I knew I had something to contribute. So, while my background is
in science, I also understand how to respond to the needs of the
country. None of this is new, but I also have the technical
understanding to know where we are at and what we need to do to make
sure that the environment is part of the political agenda.
What is your main goal for the next four years?
I will be satisfied if, in four years, we can leave the public an
orderly, efficient and capable environmental administration. I want to
give this ministry the scientific and technical muscle it needs to
accomplish its goals while also improving the administration. We need an
agile administration with the ability to respond to all of the
different problems within our communities.
Now, this is easy to say, but very hard to do. Right now the
Environment Ministry (MINAE) has some very good plans, but to put them
into action is going to require nothing short of a cultural revolution
within the administration. Conversations I’ve had with people within
MINAE have shown me that people feel overwhelmed by the inefficiency in
the organization and feel helpless. When I leave, I want these people to
feel like they are working for a ministry of extreme importance with
the capability to change the country into a place that future
generations will enjoy.
One of the largest sections in President Solís’ government plan is
the integration of the public in environmental decisions. How do you
plan to incorporate this into the ministry?
All of the environmental laws we have now already require public
participation, it’s just that no one has ever followed through with it.
This is going to be a challenge for us, but we already had some success
with this during Solís’ campaign.
We created a group called the Environmental PACto (PAC are the initials of Solís’ party, the Citizen Action Party, and pacto
means pact in Spanish). We called an open meeting on social media and
people with interest in the environment showed up to discuss
environmental issues. We created working groups with specific themes and
used suggestions from those meetings to create an environmental plan.
We want to do something similar after we take office. The goal is to
make sure that the government hears the voice of the people.
Making a more efficient Environment Ministry also loomed large on the president’s agenda. How do you plan to achieve this?
This is an enormous task for MINAE because, as I mentioned, it
involves changing the culture within the institution, but I believe it
is possible. One of the biggest examples of this inefficiency is in SETENA (SETENA
is the organization that grants environmental approval for large
development projects). It is not possible for us to make developers wait
four years for environmental approval. This inefficiency has made
people say that SETENA is development’s greatest enemy in Costa Rica,
and the president-elect has told me that my most important task is to
turn SETENA into an organization that developers see as their natural
ally.
In the past, SETENA has opened its doors to political and economic
pressures so that the projects granted approval are the ones with the
most powerful people behind them. That is not what SETENA is supposed to
be. I will make SETENA a completely technical organization, one that
none of these influences will be able to infiltrate.
A spokesperson for PAC has said that Solís will suspend the country’s 2021 carbon neutrality goal. What does this mean for the ministry’s policies related to carbon neutrality?
I don’t think we will suspend it. That spokesperson may have been
confused. I want to keep the carbon neutrality goal because it is a
benchmark that helps guide our actions. We are only 20 percent away from our goal, but it is the hardest 20
percent. It’s the reduction of emissions in the transport sector. I want
to create a strong alliance between the government and our best public
universities so that we can brainstorm solutions to this problem. This
is something we need to address now.
If you go to San José right now you’ll find an entire army of dirt
bikes driving around the streets. Now, imagine you took all of those
dirt bikes and replaced them with electric motorcycles. It would be
wonderful. Right now, the windows in San José are caked in the gray
residue of diesel grease. My children are already living in this, but I
don’t want this for my grandchildren, or for their children.
Carbon neutrality is something that would improve the lives of our
citizens, and I am not going to set a trap for myself by saying that we
will absolutely reach the 2021 goal, but I will say that this
administration is going to do everything possible to make sure that we
at least try.
Animal welfare was one of Luis Guillermo Solís’s main focuses
during his campaign, he even mentioned it in his acceptance speech. What
plans does the Environment Ministry have to make Costa Rica more
hospitable for animals?
We have laws upon laws on animal treatment already on the books in
Costa Rica, but no one enforces them. We are going to enforce the laws
we already have and pass stricter legislation so that animals are
treated in the best way possible. For wild animals, this means that they
need to stay in the wild.
Everyone who has a wild animal right now needs to register it. Once
that is done we are going to start sending officials to those houses to
make sure they only have the animals that they registered. Anyone caught
with an unregistered animal is going to face consequences.
Right now, those consequences are supposed to be jail time, but that
doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t want these people in jail. I want
them to go help build trails in the national parks or to work in a
wildlife refuge. This work is expensive for us and maybe these people
will learn something while they do it. I haven’t talked with the
president-elect about this yet, but I am sure he will agree with me.
These laws also include zoos. Once the animals that they have die, they will not be allowed to replace them.
The outgoing president, Laura Chinchilla, has said that her
greatest environmental contribution was in creating an agenda for ocean
conservation. What are your ministry’s plans for continuing this legacy?
Well, the most obvious thing is that we need to make changes to the
Costa Rican Fisheries Institute (Incopesca). Incopesca is supposed to be
a completely technical organization, so why does the current Incopesca
have a board made up of all of these industrial fishing interests? This is going to have to change.
Incopesca is going to be made up of intelligent fisheries experts.
Both the board of directors and the employees need to be experts. The
Costa Rica of today needs a larger, more specialized Incopesca.
We need to do the same thing with the National Commission for
Biodiversity Management and the Biosecurity Comission. These
organizations need to have people working in them who have the technical
skills to make decisions rather than just to whomever the government
wants to give the job.
One of the largest problems in the past has been the
interpretation and application of environmental legislation by the
judicial branch. In many cases people who commit environmental crimes
are let go. How does your administration plan to combat that?
The first issue is that we need to make sure our laws are based on
scientific evidence and clearly written. Once we have that, it is going
to clear up a lot of the problems we have in the judiciary.
The way our environmental laws are written leave them open to
interpretation instead of giving judges the scientific ends the laws are
supposed to meet. The goal is to limit absolutions from these crimes as
much as possible.
http://www.ticotimes.net/2014/05/08/meet-costa-ricas-new-environment-minister-2
