Posts

Beyond Carbon and Hectares: The Human Heart of Climate Action

For more than twenty-five years working in conservation and climate action across Latin America and Asia, one truth has become increasingly clear to me: sustainability is not achieved through technical design alone, it is built through trust, inclusion, and the ability of people to see themselves as co-owners of the solutions that shape their future. I have led strategies for REDD+ type projects, biodiversity conservation, and community resilience in some of the world’s most critical ecosystems, from the Amazon and the Chocó to climate-vulnerable landscapes in Latin America and Asia. Yet despite the diversity of geographies and cultures, the success or failure of every initiative has always hinged on one factor: how deeply it connects with the people who live in those territories. We tend to think of environmental projects in terms of metrics, tons of CO₂ avoided, hectares restored, species protected. These are important outcomes, but they tell only part of the story. What truly dete...
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What “Return on Investment” Really Means in Conservation & Development

  As I reflect now, working in the private sector after doing my MBA, I see the ambition behind the phrase “return on investment” in conservation and development in a new light: it’s not just a grant-making label, but a discipline in linking financial, ecological, and social logics into a coherent value story. What follows is how I think about ROI in these fields now, what I learned in business school, what the evidence says, and how I try to build credible impact arguments in my current work. First, ROI in conservation and development must be treated as an integrated narrative, not a single formula. In the corporate world, ROI is about dollars in vs. dollars out; but when you apply that to, say, restoring a mangrove or improving immunization coverage, you immediately confront benefits that are diffuse, time-distributed, and uncertain. So the challenge is: how do you credibly trace a dollar you spend today to avoided losses, health gains, or better resilience tomorrow? That is th...
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Conservation by Design: Understanding the Problem, Co-Creating Solutions, and Building Local Capacity

 In conservation, success isn’t just about what you protect, it’s about how you go about it. Over the past few years, the term Conservation Design has gained traction among ecologists, landscape planners, NGOs, and community leaders alike. But what exactly does it mean? Why does it matter? And how do you actually do it? This post unpacks the when, why, how, and what of Conservation Design, and more importantly, it dives into why understanding the problem, co-designing with stakeholders, and building local capacity are not just good ideas, they're essential.   What Is Conservation Design? Conservation Design is a structured, participatory, and adaptive approach to developing conservation strategies. It blends ecological science with social realities and governance structures to create interventions that are not only effective but also legitimate and sustainable. Rather than starting with pre-defined solutions, it begins with asking questions: What is the problem? W...
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Gender, Culture, and Consent: Doing Development with (not to) Indigenous and Local Communities

If a development project arrives with the best of intentions but the wrong assumptions, it can still cause harm. That risk is especially high when “gender solutions” are copied from Western contexts and dropped into Indigenous or other local communities without real partnership. This post lays out why culture and lived realities matter, what international law already requires, what the evidence shows when we ignore that, and how to design projects that are both gender-responsive and community-led. Why culture and lived realities matter for “gender work” “Gender” isn’t a single, universal experience; it’s shaped by race, class, language, age, disability, land ties, and more. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) named this the problem of intersectionality: people sit at the intersection of multiple power structures, so one-size-fits-all gender fixes often fail, or even reproduce inequality. UN Women (2022) operationalizes this by urging intersectional gender analysis across the full pr...
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Resilience, Reimagined: What It Really Means for Local Communities

We hear “resilience” everywhere, calls to build resilient cities, resilient supply chains, resilient people. Yet for many local communities the word can feel like a polite way of saying “brace for impact.” If resilience is reduced to bouncing back to the way things were, it risks becoming a mandate to absorb shocks without changing the conditions that made people vulnerable in the first place. In practice, resilience worth having is less about elasticity and more about agency: the power of communities to decide what to protect, what to let go of, and when to transform rather than “return to normal.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change frames climate-resilient development as an integration of adaptation and mitigation with equity and justice, while recognizing Indigenous and local knowledge as essential to doing it well (IPCC, 2022). That is a profound shift from technocratic “fixes” toward democratic problem-solving. A second shift is overdue: from projectizing resilience t...
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El país que eligió la vida: una bitácora desde el corazón verde de América

 Viajar a Costa Rica con mis hijos fue mucho más que unas vacaciones; fue una lección viviente sobre lo que significa convivir en armonía con la naturaleza, sobre cómo un país entero puede construir su identidad a partir del respeto profundo por la vida. Desde que aterrizamos, sentí que estábamos entrando en otro ritmo, uno más pausado, más atento. La primera vez que escuchamos un “pura vida” en la calle sonreímos, sin saber que esa expresión se volvería el hilo conductor de toda nuestra experiencia. Lo decía el chofer del bus, lo decía la señora del puesto de frutas, lo decía el guía en medio del bosque, y lo decíamos nosotros, cada vez con más intención. “Pura vida” no era un cliché. Era una forma de mirar el mundo. Costa Rica se siente como un país que decidió hace tiempo tomarse en serio el futuro. Más de veinte años atrás, mientras otros seguían apostando por la explotación de sus recursos sin medida, aquí se gestaba un movimiento social silencioso pero decidido: proteger los ...
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Beyond Individual Effort: Why Collaboration is Key to Biodiversity Conservation

Surviving Together in a Time of Crisis We are living through the sixth mass extinction. Species are vanishing 100 to 1,000 times faster than natural rates. But throughout history, humanity has thrived not by acting alone, but by cooperating. From hunting in groups to building cities, our survival has always depended on collective effort. Today, the environmental crisis demands that same instinct. Countless NGOs work tirelessly to protect ecosystems, but isolated efforts, no matter how passionate, can’t match the scale or urgency of what we face. Saving biodiversity requires not just more action, but smarter, collective action. Collaboration among NGOs goes far beyond joint statements or shared events. True networked work means: Building common goals across organizations. Coordinating strategies across regions and sectors. Sharing resources, knowledge, and influence. Speaking to policymakers and funders with a unified voice. This approach transforms conservation work. Instead of duplica...
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