Costa Rica houses an incredible variety of life. While it occupies only .001% of the globe, Costa Rica contains 4% of global diversity. The size of West Virginia, it contains more species than the United States and Canada combined. In addition, the country has come under tremendous development pressures in the past half century. By 1995, over 71% of Costa Rica's old growth forest lands had been cleared to make way for beef cattle production, timber harvesting, coffee plantations, and banana plantations. Until several years ago, the country had antiquated squatter's laws that encouraged landowners to make physical changes to their lands to protect their rights of possession.

In order to protect its wealth of natural resources from such development pressure, in recent years Costa Rica has developed one of the most extensive systems of environmental protection in the world, and it has received a great deal of international attention for its accomplishments in this field. This system includes protection of 25% of the country's land area in public parks, conservation areas, national monuments, and other public lands; regulation of private lands through aggressive legislation; and incentive programs to encourage conservation or reforestation of private lands, including tax incentives, loan programs, tax certificate programs, conservation easements, and by providing payments for environmental services.