Making Sustainability Real: Tour Costa Rica
Making Sustainability Real – Our Tour Course
Learn sustainability and environmental management while touring real life examples of sustainability in action. We visit examples of people and communities making a difference in creating a better future. Costa Rica’s dense biodiversity and history of working toward sustainable development gives us opportunities to find creative approaches for our own communities and our own countries while building valuable career skills. The Natural Capital of Costa Rica has been used to create innovative development and conservation strategies. Our natural capital in general and biodiversity particularly, are at risk globally. This course lets you take lessons learned here and adapt them to make you more effective at creating the change you want.
Venues visited include examples of sustainable development in the following sectors:
- Tourism
- Conservation biology
- Sustainable agriculture
This course can be customized for your group’s interests
Course duration – 8 days – @50 contact hours

Detailed Course Description
Making Sustainability Real: Our Tour Course
Our natural capital in general and biodiversity particularly, are at risk globally. Pathways to sustainable development depend on wise use and innovative conservation of natural resources. Properly managed and protected natural capital can generate economic opportunities and be the catalyst for the growth of sustainable communities and businesses.
Program duration – 8 days – @50 contact hours
Target group
Undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. We seek to create diverse interdisciplinary groups.
Pre-requisites
Coursework in a related discipline; such as conservation, biology, ecology, forestry, natural resources, wildlife, sustainability, environmental design, environmental management, engineering, tourism development, policy, community development, anthropology, communications, business, etc. If you feel your experiences will allow you to fully benefit from the course, but you do not neatly fit in the preceding description of pre-requisites, please contact us and we will discuss your interest further.
Introduction
Billions of people live in rural and semi-rural communities in the developing nations of the world – many of them in poverty and lacking the essentials needed for human health, development and even simple dignity. Pressures mount to use natural resources in unsustainable ways, further jeopardizing biodiversity and creating a dangerous downward spiral of environmental degradation.
Biodiversity based natural capital can be identified, protected, and utilized for development at the local, regional, and national levels to achieve the goals of sustainable development. Benefits derived thereof can be further leveraged to implement restorative endeavors, grow empowered communities, and implement educational/behavior change campaigns to further spread and magnify positive impacts. This course will show students real life examples of this and help them to propagate these “seeds” of sustainable development.
Rationale
Costa Rica has had a great deal of success in using its natural resources for economic development.
We will visit sites where natural resources are being utilized in entrepreneurial ways, developing revenue, employment, and innovative opportunities for continued sustainable development and ecosystem restoration.
Sustainable community development is a central theme for many of the organizations we will be working with, which includes the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (National Institute of Biodiversity – INBIO). We also emphasize innovation – many more valuable assets derived from biodiversity remain undiscovered and bio-prospecting / Biomimicry are important parts of a sustainable future.
Goals and Objectives
The primary goals of the course are to stimulate the student’s ability to design and implement sustainable development solutions based on stewardship and restoration of natural resources, while giving them real skills, a new way of seeing the world’s resources, and the confidence to create inspired solutions when they encounter the crucial challenges of sustainable development. Scalability and profitability remain challenges to propagating the solutions we will see and conceptualize. This is a core topic of the course – how do we make sustainable development “go viral,” particularly for at-risk communities in the developing world?
Venues visited include examples of sustainable development in the following sectors:
- Sustainable and Community Based Tourism
- Conservation biology
- Sustainable Agriculture
- Forestry and Reforestation
- Agro-forestry
- Watershed management
- Carbon sequestration
- Community development and resilience
- Bioprospecting
Required materials
Laptop or tablet – project(s) and topic information from home on one or more solutions or themes the student wishes to craft and develop.
Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete the course will come away with a stronger understanding of the opportunities for sustainable development in concert with natural resource conservation and restoration. They will analyze the obstacles to success – policy gaps, the need for frameworks for payment for ecosystem services, inadequate finance and access to markets, poor infrastructure, challenges for creating value added commodities, weak marketing, education and communications, and more.
Our real-life, case study-based approach, with a mix of site visits, lectures, discussions, and presentations, gives the students opportunities to share and develop their ideas and solutions in a constructive and analytical group setting, with critiques by the group, course leader and guest experts. Each student will demonstrate their command of the course materials by creating, either individually or in groups, a capstone project based on solutions to real world problems.
Assessment and Evaluation
Students will be evaluated by their peers, the course leader, and themselves on the basis of their participation, professionalism, commitment, and their capstone project. Students who successfully complete the course will be issued a certificate of completion and a written evaluation.