EcoStrategist

  Lately, I’ve been diving deeper into Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and I wanted to share my understanding of what it actually means, why it matters for the future of climate action, and why I think we should be talking about it a lot more. Because even though carbon markets and international climate policy may sound technical and distant, Article 6 is essentially about one big question: How can countries work together to reduce emissions in a fair, transparent, and effective way?   So, What Is Article 6? Article 6 is one of the most complex, and fascinating, parts of the Paris Agreement. It creates rules for how countries can cooperate to meet their climate goals, especially through carbon markets. It’s divided into three key parts, but the two that are shaping global carbon markets the most are: Article 6.2 – Cooperative Approaches Allows countries to trade emissions reductions between each other through “ITMOs” (Internationally Transferre...

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...

  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...

 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...

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...

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...