Sustainability and Education in Costa Rica’s DNA

This year, Costa Rica will become the epicentre of the meetings industry in Latin America when it hosts FIEXPO. They are also forging a sustainability partnership with ICCA to further develop one of the country’s strengths: environmental protection. We sat down with the country’s leading players to talk about sustainability, technology and talent.

Costa Rica will host FIEXPO LATIN AMERICA for the next three years, taking over from neighbouring Panama as the host of the most important tradeshow in the region. FIEXPO is the place par excellence where destinations and suppliers connect with buyers in LATAM and establish links with political decision-makers to guarantee economic, intercultural and social benefits for all. Enjoying a convenient central location that places it halfway to this annual meeting, Costa Rica has collected several accolades and upgrades in terms of infrastructure, connectivity, local support and education.

With a robust hotel complex that comprises a total of 50,500 rooms and the construction of a new convention centre with capacity for meetings of up to 3,000 people, Costa Rica has taken a key step towards becoming a beacon destination for meetings and incentive travel in Latin America. “We have been working on a strategy for over ten years with our value chain, based on the pillars of service, quality and professionalisation to be competitive on a cost-benefi t basis. In other words, we cannot sleep on the returns the country gets from its forests and parks. The experience has to be greater than the destination alone,” told us Tatiana Orozco, Executive Director of Costa Rica Convention Bureau, during the ICCA LATAM & Caribbean Chapter 2024.

This commitment to sustainability is not new. Almost two decades ago, Costa Rica defined a tourism model rooted in its environmental and forest heritage, guiding tourism infrastructure and a supply chain based on balancing social, economic and environmental development – ultimately giving rise to the MICE Forest project. Costa Rica is the only country to meet all five of the United Nations Development Programme’s criteria for measuring environmental sustainability and ranks third in the Americas on the Environmental Performance Index. The nation has twice been ranked as the country with the best performance in environmental sustainability by the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index.
 

Moreover, Costa Rica has around 6% of the world’s biodiversity – the country with the highest density of species per area in the world – and is a global leader in environmental protection with investment policies in renewable energies. “In 1995, Costa Rica was experiencing a huge deforestation problem and our political decision-makers decided to take drastic measures. Today, we have more than 26% of our territory protected and we are at around 99% in clean energy generation. It has been a strategy that has evolved, and although it’s true that we started from the environmental side, today we have a very solid strategy with the other two social and economic pillars. We also want to leave an impact on a global level, as we are committed to making every event we host carbon neutral,” she adds.

At the same time, the convention bureau also sees the sector as a viable alternative for tackling the problem of talent drain, which is one of the key challenges facing Latin America. “What is happening right now is that new generations are not going to put money before their mental health, their personal development and their own professional experiences. We can resolve this issue with specific conferences to encourage young people to take part and understand the importance of this segment, because we have to sell the destination to them too.” The sustainability factor has given the country a competitive edge, but the number of multinationals the country is home to has also enabled them to realise another outpouring of knowledge. “42% of our events are in the medical industry, because all the microchips for medical components and devices that are manufactured in the world come from Costa Rica. We are almost an intermediate assembly platform for medtech. Other sectors that we prioritise are technology and education,” says Orozco.

Costa Rica's Meeting House

Costa Rica has always enjoyed leading status in ecotourism, adventure, leisure and even wellness, but in the meetings industry its journey is only in the beginning. At least that is what Álvaro Rojas, General Manager of the Costa Rica Convention Centre (CRCC) shared with us: “We built our strategy just seven years ago and the first change we had to make was to realise that this industry worked in a totally different way to others. With a series of consultants and advisors, and also using the example of other sister destinations in the Americas, we were able to readjust the strategy and focus on something that generates value.” Opened six years ago, the CRCC is a landmark in the country’s sustainable design with car parking areas interspersed with endemic tropical plantations and extensive biological ditches for rainwater management – critical considerations that led to its LEED Gold certification.
 

“Our visitors’ perspective on sustainability generates a lot of value for our local event network. By instance, what impact does your event have on CO2 emissions? This requires a technique, a calculator, audited and certified results to know how to off set carbon emissions from a corporate governance perspective,” he adds. The centre has its own post-operational methodology called Carbon Clear Events by Heroica, which has been used to calculate and mitigate this carbon burden: “We are currently measuring all the excess carbon we produced in 2023 with the help of our carbon calculator, in order to generate positive compensation with the State of Costa Rica through a foundation called FONAFIFO.”

In Latin America, around 20% of the types of events being held this year were not even brought up before the pandemic: “We are talking about blockchain, the Internet Of Things, cryptography, and a whole series of new topics. Specifically, the issue of semiconductors is fundamental for the Costa Rican government because we are the hub in a nearshoring to bring semiconductors to the United States.” According to Álvaro, this has created a very interesting opportunity for the local meetings industry, “The meetings industry has a very dynamic and adaptable belt for attracting local talent, because in six months we can change our academic and technological agenda. Therefore, the Costa Rican government now relies on the meetings industry to support its entire global strategy, such as semiconductors.”