Ronald Sanabria sought to make tourism more sustainable

Tourism often brings large promises to small places. It can bring money to forests, beaches, villages, parks, and old towns. It can make a family guesthouse viable or give a young person a reason to stay. It can help persuade a government that a forest has value standing. It can also strain the places it sells. 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 keeps the consequences.

Ronald Sanabria spent much of his career in the gap between promise and practice. He did not treat sustainable tourism as a slogan or a marketing category. He treated it as a chain of work that had to reach businesses, buyers, governments, and communities. 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. If sustainability was to mean anything, it had to pass through those relationships.

Sanabria, who died on July 1st, aged 57, was a Costa Rican engineer who became one of the most influential figures 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 concrete: help businesses reduce waste, improve quality, protect nature, support local livelihoods, and reach markets that valued those things.

His path began before the job titles. 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 left a mark on him. 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.

That applied instinct became his signature. He disliked technical language when it shut out the people who most needed to use the idea. 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 sincere, some thin. 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.

His work won awards, but 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. He was respected because he made 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. In his case, the phrase was not ornamental. He had found a way to join conservation and livelihoods without pretending the join was simple. He leaves behind standards, institutions, colleagues, and many small decisions made differently because he had passed through a room and made sustainability seem possible, concrete, and worth the trouble.

Banner image: Ronald Sanabria. Image via IDH.