Alvaro Umaña

Alvaro Umaña-Quesada (born ) is a Costa Rican academic, environmentalist, and politician who served as Minister of Natural Resources, Energy and Mines from 1986 to 1990. He is credited for pursuing successful environmental policies which promoted conservation and reversed the country's high deforestation rates. He stars in the film, Paved Paradise, released in the Netherlands in 2023.

Education Umaña has a BSc in physics and an MSc in environmental pollution control from Pennsylvania State University. He has a master’s in economics and a PhD in environmental engineering and science from Stanford University.

Environment minister By the 1980's, Costa Rica had one of the worst records of deforestation in Central America. Alvaro Umaña recognised that successful conservation required cooperation and support from local communities. When Óscar Arias became president in 1986, he created a cabinet-level Ministry of Environment, Energy and Mines , and appointed Umaña as its first head. The purpose of the new ministry was to bring together disparate environmental agencies, to clarify their jurisdictional boundaries, and to improve coordination between the agencies.

Umaña developed a system of regional conservation units to incorporate all of the biological reserves, forest reserves, wildlife refuges, and indigenous reserves within each regional unit. In his first year as minister nearly 15,000 acres were reforested. Much of the logging was illegal, and involved the felling of trees within national parks, in which logs were hauled out of the parks at night, or were hidden under beds of agricultural produce, and aided by the widespread use of forged logging permits.

Umaña has been the director of the Environmentally Sustainable Development Group at the United Nations Development Programme in New York.