More artisans set up shop in Costa Rica each year. Just in time for you to finish up your holiday shopping, here are a few terrific gifts that were painted, printed, written, designed or concocted in Costa Rica.

In Mexico, conservationists say, environmental oversight is becoming as vulnerable as the wildlife, as program budgets have shrunk and scores of employees at the agency that monitors protected areas have been fired.

In anticipation of the 195-nation climate talks that start Monday, The Tico Times offers this short primer and guide to our previously-published climate change stories so that you can read up before the conference starts.

Zero Army, in San José's Barrio Amón, aims to make conservation easy, colorful and delicious.

The conservation agreement calls for more expeditious and severe punishment for people found guilty of trafficking endangered wildlife species, and greater exchange of conservation experts, students and researchers.

Monkeys at break time drive home the point of Costa Rica conservation conference in Punta Leona — that nature and tourism are friends.

Illegal coca cultivation is surging in Colombia, erasing one of the showcase achievements of U.S. counternarcotics policy and threatening to send a burst of cheap cocaine through the smuggling pipeline to the United States.

An international conference on private conservation and sustainable tourism kicked off Monday night at the Wyndham San José Herradura Hotel, with Vice President Ana Helena Chacón preaching to a choir from over a dozen countries about the need for sustainable, earth-friendly growth in a global economy.

"We want to show action and sustainability in an extraordinary way,” said Green Circle Experience co-founder Ed Smit.

One of the most spectacular wildlife displays on the planet is happening in the skies over Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast right now: fall raptor migration and the formation of a "river of raptors." And thanks to a geographic bottleneck, one of the best places in the world to witness it is the Kèköldi indigenous territory on Costa Rica's southern Caribbean coast.