Costa Rica’s Country Program On Carbon Neutrality 2.0: Category Municipalities

In brief

Overview

Costa Rica’s Country Program on Carbon Neutrality 2.0 (Programa País de Carbono Neutralidad 2.0; PPCN 2.0) is a national climate policy instrument that encourages organisations (private and public), businesses and companies as well as local governments to measure, reduce and compensate for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It uses a ‘system of recognition’ (‘sistema de reconocimiento’) of mitigation efforts by the participants.

The program’s ‘local government category’ targets specifically Costa Rica’s 82 municipalities (‘cantones’) and their districts and communities: Programa País de Carbono Neutralidad: Categoría cantonal (PPCNC) it is called. The PPCNC grants official government symbols (‘símbolos’), i.e. certificates, endorsed by the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment and Energy (Ministerio de Ambiente y Energía, MINAE), to participating municipalities and districts for their endeavours in climate change mitigation.

There are five levels of recognitions with the respective symbol to obtain:

1. recognition for elaborating a GHG inventory;
2. recognition for managing mitigation actions and quantifying GHG emissions reductions;
3. recognition for taking additional reduction actions defined by the programme;
4. recognition for compensating for emissions that have not been reduced by the actions taken (possible mechanisms of compensation are set in the program); and
5. recognition for taking additional compensation actions.