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.

The number of hectares destroyed by fires in protected areas nearly doubled from the 2014 wildfire season.

Tourism sector leaders are asking President Luis Guillermo Solís to refrain from filing an appeal against the court's ruling.

Whitewater rafters, indigenous people and other advocates of the world-famous Pacuare River say it would be a disaster to dam this national treasure to produce electricity. They're currently in talks with the Solís administration to produce a presidential decree preventing the damming of this river for the foreseeable future. But with the Costa Rican Electricity Institute having promised in 2009 to build nothing on the Pacuare for 20 years, how real is the threat?

The rising popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has caused them to show up everywhere from private back yards to national parks, and the...