- Ronald Sanabria helped turn sustainable tourism from a set of good intentions into a discipline of standards, training, certification, and market access.
- His work at the Rainforest Alliance focused on making tourism useful to the places it depended on, especially small businesses and community-based enterprises.
- He understood that tourism could protect forests and support local livelihoods only if hotels, tour operators, governments, and buyers changed how they worked.
- His influence endured less through public recognition than through the institutions he helped build and the many people he helped make sustainability usable.
Tourism often reaches small places with large promises. It can bring money to forests, beaches, villages, parks, and old towns. A family guesthouse may become viable. A young person may have a reason to stay. It can help persuade a government that a forest has value if left standing. The same industry can also strain the places it sells. In many places, roads arrive before rules. Hotels take the best land. Water and waste are handled after the money has begun to flow. Wildlife, wages, and culture are folded into the business later, if they are dealt with at all. The traveler leaves with photographs. The community is left with the consequences.
Ronald Sanabria spent much of his career between what tourism said it could do and what it actually did. For him, sustainable tourism meant work: credible standards, training, certification, purchasing decisions, local capacity, and steady persuasion. Tourism, he knew, was too fragmented for simple answers. The same trip might involve a hotel, a guide, a tour operator, a booking platform, a transport company, and a village association. The work had to reach those relationships, or sustainability would remain a claim.
Sanabria, who died on July 1st, aged 57, was a Costa Rican engineer who became a central figure in sustainable tourism in Latin America and beyond. He joined the Rainforest Alliance in 1998, first in sustainable agriculture. Two years later, he began building its sustainable-tourism program. Over the next two decades, he worked with hotels, tour operators, community enterprises, governments, NGOs, and certification bodies across the region. His aim was direct: help businesses reduce waste, improve quality, protect nature, support local livelihoods, and reach markets that valued those things.
The career had roots in his upbringing. He grew up partly around coffee country, where his father worked, and he later traced his choices to that childhood and to Costa Rica itself. The country’s national parks, its lack of an army, its investments in education, and its approach to development shaped his ambitions. At the University of Costa Rica, he trained as an industrial engineer in the years after the Rio summit, when the language of sustainable development was entering classrooms and businesses. He did not want a factory career. For his thesis, he applied engineering tools to conservation planning in a protected area on Costa Rica’s Caribbean side.
He carried that applied way of thinking into tourism. He disliked technical language when it shut out the people expected to act on it. The first task with small and micro-entrepreneurs, he said, was to demystify sustainability, avoid specialist vocabulary, and reduce best practices to common sense. Many small businesses, especially family-owned or community-based ones, were already doing part of the work. They needed recognition, better management, peer learning, and links to buyers. He believed a recommendation often carried more weight when it came from another business facing the same pressures.
He also understood the limits of good intentions. Tourism was full of green claims, some backed by real work and some not. He helped build the Sustainable Tourism Certification Network of the Americas and later helped create the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, which sought common principles in a field crowded with competing labels. He did not expect one seal to dominate tourism as some labels had done in agriculture. The industry was too varied. What it needed was credibility, and a way to connect certification with the companies that shaped demand.
Awards marked some of this work. Much of its value was less visible: a tour operator choosing different suppliers; an instructor bringing sustainability into a classroom; a community enterprise learning how to meet a market without losing itself; a government seeing tourism as a reason to protect a place. Colleagues respected him for making large ideas usable.
He remained attached to the Rainforest Alliance after he was no longer a staff member, calling it the right home for his professional dreams. He seemed to mean it plainly. He had found a way to join conservation and livelihoods without pretending the effort was simple. The work remains in standards, institutions, colleagues, and small decisions made differently in places where tourism had usually arrived first and asked questions later.
Banner image: Ronald Sanabria. Image via IDH.
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This story first appeared on Mongabay
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