The Environmental Prosecutor of the Public Prosecutor’s Office receives more than 2,000 annual complaints, many of which are from public institutions that deal with the issue. Therefore, in order for people to identify more and more with environmental causes, a campaign called “Do you protect the environment?” was launched , which starts this week and runs until November 14th.
Environmental crimes show that people who damage nature in Costa Rica are doing so for some economic purpose and transfer the costs of a degraded environment to the community.
The campaign initiative was coordinated by the Attorney General’s Office and 13 messages will be released that expose the most common environmental criminal actions, the damage they cause, and the criminal consequences.
Luis Diego Hernández, Deputy Environmental Prosecutor, said that the idea is that people identify with the environment, that they see it as a heritage, not as something alien whose damage is not going to affect them.
Alejandro Alpízar Arrones, coordinating prosecutor of the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office, said that no process can succeed without citizen participation.
We want to emphasize to people that reporting is essential, we are noticing in our statistics that there is not so much citizen complaint, but that these come from the Public Ministry itself and other public institutions that are responsible for investigating these crimes, but we know that citizens do know that criminal behavior occurs,”
said Alpízar.