Costa Rica is well known for its eco-tourism, and for the most part, Costa Rica has done an exceptional job when it comes to being a leader in protecting its precious environment. It started years ago when Costa Rica truly came onto the global scene as a hotspot for eco-tourism (still a popular niche in the tourism industry), and continues today as Costa Rica is one of four countries in a race to be the first to go carbon neutral (the other three countries are New Zealand, Iceland, and Norway).
That's why it is not surprising to find a real estate development in Costa Rica that has adopted a firm stance on protecting the environment. In fact, in my opinion, it should be odd to find a Costa Rican development that does NOT take a strong stance. Of course, I don't rule the world yet!
The development that I am speaking of is Las Colinas de Miramar in the Central Pacific of Costa Rica, a Certified Green Worldwide development. The Certified Green Worldwide designation is a 12-point protocol that mandates comprehensive environmental safeguards:
- Protection of wildlife habitats while allowing for recreation.
- Protection of wetlands, natural water courses and aquifer regeneration areas.
- Soil erosion safeguards; both during road building, construction, and occupation.
- Utility operations, site specific or municipal, to contain contamination retention features for ground water protection.
- Development plans consistent with local mandates, inputs and requirements.
- Maintenance of natural geologic contours.
- No construction on sites with a slope greater than 40 degrees.
- Density restrictions; based on a formula of slope and wet land proximity.
- View shed protections including project height standards.
- Construction to use low wattage consumption by electric appliances and fixtures, insulated windows and walls using passive solar techniques, and recycling to reduce the carbon footprint. Potential solar electrical generation may become additional options.
- Encourage community related sustainable economic development though the use of locally produced building materials and local labor.
- Good Corporation Citizenship.
As an aspiring Eco-broker, it gladdens me to work with a developer so dedicated to protecting the environment. That is why I am going to do my part by purchasing carbon offsets from Carbonfund.org. I am promising that for each Phase 1 lot I sell in Las Colinas de Miaramar, I will buy enough carbon offsets to make a medium sized home (1500-2499 sq ft) carbon neutral for one year.
So what can you do to make better take care of our Earth?
Copyright 2008 The Costa Rica Real Estate Expert. All rights reserved.
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Tiffany,
Awesome on so many levels! Great to see a development of this sort going on in CR (although i'm sure there are plenty of so-called green developments already). Great to see you are interested in getting the EcoBroker certification - I found it to really educational, and very helpful for getting my real estate career off of the ground. And thanks so much for reminding me of the carbonfund... I need to start using this and offering it to clients.
p.s. i've spent a lot of time in central america and driven it back and forth from the panama canal to tucson, az. I'm eventually going to get back down there to invest in green development, would love any insight you might have.