SAN JOSE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – This greenest of Central American nations this month broke the world record for the most consecutive days running on renewable energy \u2013 300.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s one area where Costa Rica is still struggling to meet its Paris Agreement commitment to cut emissions, experts say: the transport system.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve kept a very clean electrical grid running. Where Costa Rica is still underperforming \u2013 and it\u2019s typical of most developing countries \u2013 is in transport. That\u2019s where our Achilles heel is,\u201d said Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican and the former head of the U.N. climate secretariat.<\/p>\n
According to the country\u2019s National Meteorological Institute, 64 percent of Costa Rica\u2019s climate-changing emissions come from energy use, and more than two thirds of those come from transport.<\/p>\n
Marcela Guerrero, a Costa Rican national legislator, said the country\u2019s outdated and inefficient public transport system has led people to instead rely heavily on cars and other personal vehicles.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Costa Rica does not prioritize an increase in the use of public transport, I think we\u2019ll be very far from achieving our Paris Agreement commitments,\u201d Guerrero said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.<\/p>\n
But cleaner individual vehicles also will be important, she said. To reduce car and truck emissions, Guerrero in 2015 proposed providing financial incentives for adopting electric vehicles.<\/p>\n
Those could include exemption from a range of fees \u2013 including parking meter costs and driving permits \u2013 to lower import taxes and vehicle transfer fees.<\/p>\n
Such incentives would need to last just five years \u2013 long enough to give a new industry a boost, she predicted.<\/p>\n
\u201cCosta Rica has unmatched conditions (for adoption of electric transport) in comparison with the rest of Latin America\u201d because its electrical grid relies on renewable energy, she said \u2013 meaning electric vehicles would have near zero emissions.<\/p>\n
Guerrero\u2019s proposed bill is still awaiting a vote but it is set to see a final debate on Nov. 30. She believes it\u2019s likely to pass as it has increasing parliamentary support and it\u2019s \u201can important piece of the puzzle\u201d for the country to hit its climate goals, she said.<\/p>\n
Meanwhihle, vehicle ownership is soaring in Costa Rica. According to data from the country\u2019s National Registry, there are twice as may cars registered each year as babies born.<\/p>\n
Most are individual vehicles \u2013 no surprise, Guerrero said, when public transport remains \u201cdeficient\u201d.<\/p>\n
Buses, in turn, have seen little in the way of modernization of routes and stops, in part because bus company owners sit on the bus regulatory board, and are reluctant to make changes that could increase operating costs, Guerrero said.<\/p>\n
The result is that 30 percent of Costa Ricans say they don\u2019t use public transport because of its inefficiency, according to the country\u2019s 2017 State of the Nation report.<\/p>\n
Modernizing public transport with better routes and more electric buses and trains could help lower Costa Rica\u2019s dependency on individual vehicles and cut emissions, Guerrero said.<\/p>\n
But pushing for cleaner cars is also key, she said, since even with a better public transport system not everyone will opt to use it.<\/p>\n
Jairo Quir\u00f3s, an electrical engineer at the Universidad de Costa Rica, said the country is well suited to electric cars, and not just because the country\u2019s electric power is low carbon.<\/p>\n
More than 90 percent of people that own cars also have a garage where they could charge their electric vehicles without the need for large-scale public investment in charging stations, he said.<\/p>\n
Because Costa Rica is a small nation, limitations on the range of electric vehicles also are not a significant problem, Quir\u00f3s said.<\/p>\n
He agreed with Guerrero that, with the right incentives, Costa Rica could have a competitive electric vehicle market in five years.<\/p>\n
The push for electric transport has met some criticism, including that the country\u2019s clean power grid couldn\u2019t stand up to the increased demand for electricity.<\/p>\n
But \u201cwe have studied how many electric vehicles our renewable grid can hold and with the amount of vehicles projected from now to 2025, the grid holds just fine,\u201d Quir\u00f3s said.<\/p>\n
For now, the biggest barrier to putting Costa Ricans in the seat of electric cars \u2013 or buses \u2013 is price, Guerrero said. But with electric vehicles becoming more popular around the world \u2013 and with financial incentives to buy one proposed at home \u2013 that barrier is unlikely to last, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a perfect series of conditions for this change to happen,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SAN JOSE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – This greenest of Central American nations this month broke the world record for the most consecutive days running on renewable energy \u2013 300. But there\u2019s one area where Costa Rica is still struggling to meet its Paris Agreement commitment to cut emissions, experts say: the transport system. \u201cWe\u2019ve kept a very clean electrical grid… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1121,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}