The “cloud forest” of Monteverde, in the center of Costa Rica, would soon no longer be worthy of the name. Climate change threatens this unique ecosystem, and its fauna and flora face an unclear future under a brilliant blue sky.
In the forest, what a visitor should hear is the constant drip of moisture falling from the trees. Instead, it is the sound of dead branches snapping underfoot that breaks the silence on the dry trails.
The high-altitude forest is clinging to life, and it delights walkers with an infinite variety of greens under an uncomfortably bright sun.
Photo: AFP
The fog, which reigned supreme here only a short time ago, dissipates as the temperature rises, 24-year-old forest guide Andrey Castrillo said.
“The forest should be cool,” he said. “You should hear the drops falling all over the forest, but that only happens during the wettest and windiest days of the rainy season.”
Before, “there was no sun ... we had about 30 days of sunshine a year. Now we have more than 130,” he said.
At 1,400m above sea level and 140km northwest of the capital, San Jose, the private nature reserve extends over 14,200 hectares and is home to 100 species of mammals, 440 bird species and 1,200 types of amphibians.
This exceptional type of altitude forest represents only 1 percent of the world’s tropical and subtropical areas.
“Near-ground cloud cover forms when the humidity saturation is above 90 percent, with temperatures between 14°C and 18°C,” University of Costa Rica researcher Ana Maria Duran said.
Duran said she had been coming here regularly for more than 20 years.
Normally, the “almost permanent” fog gives the impression of “practically walking in the middle of the clouds,” with visibility down to barely 1 meter.
As she spoke, she stared into the forest where the temperature had risen to more than 25°C, under a blue sky where only a few clouds crowned the peaks.
“Coming to Monteverde to find such dry conditions, and not being in the clouds like it was 20 years ago when I started coming is obviously very sad,” Duran said.
Rising temperatures mean lower humidity and more sun. The mosses have dried on the tree trunks, the rivers are no more than streams and the amphibians have been the first victims of climate change.
“The decline of amphibians in cloud forests may serve as a wake-up call,” University of Costa Rica biologist Andrea Vincent said.
Already, the species Incilius periglenes, known as the golden toad, has been considered extinct since 2019 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“A cloudless cloud forest, it will disappear, it has to,” Vincent said, adding that “there will be a lot of extinctions” of different species.
However, this “dispiriting scenario” can still be avoided, she said.
“Ecosystems are resilient. If we make efforts to stop climate change, it is possible that cloud forests will recover ... not during our lifetime, but perhaps for the next generations,” she said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
RSS