Map showing the location of Costa Rica (click for more detail)

Costa Rica is very rich in plants and wildlife: it has over 8,000 different native plants. (The UK, which is five times bigger, has 1,443.) Costa Rica has already lost a great deal of its forest and about 3% of what is left disappears every year. This is the highest rate in Central America apart from El Salvador.

The Corcovado National Park is on the Osa Peninsular. Around it is the buffer zone, where an NGO called TUVA is working with the local landowners. These farmers need money but they don’t want to cut the forest to create extra farming land, nor do they want to sell the logging rights to a timber company because they depend on it for many non-timber forest products. Working as co-operatives, they take out trees which have fallen naturally. These are stripped of branches on site and cut into manageable blocks of wood. This means there is minimum damage to other trees when the wood is hauled out. Another advantage is that 60-70% of the tree (the unusable branches) is left to rot, providing nutrients for new plants and homes for small wildlife.

Water buffalo are used to haul the wood out and a breeding centre has been set up, supported by WLT. Training and information for other local people are also offered here. The project is not all low-tech; the co-operatives use specialised monitoring and information systems to locate suitable trees and the farmers have solar panels and radio phones.

	You can find out more about the park at this tourism website and you can also visit TUVA online

Right: Using water buffalo is safe, cheap and causes little damage as the buffalo can use narrow forest tracks – and they provide milk!