Angélica Mayolo, MIT consultant, during the Common Finance Summit in early September in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia).CAF
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Among the thousand and one positions that Angélica Mayolo (Buenaventura, Colombia, 33 years old) has held, there is one of particular personal importance: Daughter of the Colombian Pacific. The lawyer and former culture minister of Colombia is now one of the advisors for the climate solutions program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but she still has her sights set on the areas where she grew up. “While the academy has the capacity for technological development, the traditional knowledge of what actions to take lies with indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities,” he says after his presentation at the Common Finance Summit in Cartagena in September de Indias took place. However, he regrets that the funds are not arriving. “The only poor landowners are the ethnic communities. And we cannot continue to condemn those who preserve ecological wealth to financial poverty.”
During the conversation, in which she took part together with Sandra Vilardy, Vice Minister of Environmental Policy and Standardization of the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, and Juan Pablo Bonilla, Manager of the Climate Change and Sustainable Development Sector of the IDB, Mayolo was, among other things, very clear: “We will Find solutions to climate change nowhere else but in nature itself.”
As she opened the floor to questions from the public, an Indigenous woman stood up and said in front of a microphone: “You’re talking to us about debt, about betting on clean energy… And I ask you: Have you asked yourself if this is the world? ? “In which the one in which we, the locals, want to live?” Minutes later, in an interview with América Futura, Mayolo says he thought about it and realized that “governments in the past did not take into account the perspective of ethnic communities have”. For this reason, he adds: “The research we want to conduct not only recognizes the expertise of the academy, but also has the ability to understand the knowledge of traditional communities.”
Currently, the Natural Climate Solutions Program it is working on promotes this combined intervention model: developing technology and strengthening local and community capacities for biodiversity monitoring and risk management in cities that host strategic ecosystems such as Quibdó and Mocoa in Colombia .
The research represented by the University of Buenos Aires is based on three main pillars: multidisciplinary research, transfer of skills between science and communities and, finally, the effective guarantee of participation. “That means it shouldn’t be anything discursive. “We want indigenous peoples to help implement solutions,” adds the also chair of the Afro-Inter-American Forum on Climate Change. This initiative, operating in 46 countries around the world, aims to become a network that expands knowledge about the African American population and is part of local and global decision-making.
“In Latin America, we have made enormous efforts to collectively recognize territories, but this recognition has not been accompanied by mechanisms for access to finance and strengthening of technical capacity. We have not yet implemented strong sustainable economic projects in the region,” he admits. The solution for Mayolo is for multilateral banks and governments to guarantee sustainable models such as environmental education, community tourism or the fair participation of ethnic groups in carbon markets.
Although these types of initiatives, known as REDD+, require broad socialization and participation from the entire community, in practice they are typically neither well regulated nor directly benefit local people. Over the last six years, more than a hundred private market and carbon credit projects have emerged in Colombia, the vast majority of which have been heavily challenged by the environmental sector. “We need to think differently and see communities as partners and not just beneficiaries,” he adds. “They are not waiting to get anything, just to be recognized for their work as stewards of nature and to be given the mechanisms to develop it in a productive and sustainable way.”
The list of environmental leaders that Mayolo admires is very long: Katia Penha, promoter of the development of Quilombola communities and the protection of the Brazilian Amazon, Yimene Calderon and her work in Honduras for the rights of the Garifuna community or Josefina Klinger, determining factor in the implementation of environmental protection measures in Nuquí (Colombia) and Ensenada de Utria… The latter is director of the Mano Cambiada Corporation, an organization that has been promoting the region and local entrepreneurship in the Colombian Pacific for 20 years. . One of the dreams of this leader, named one of the Women of Courage 2022, is to create an ecological biodiversity training center. “Do you think a woman led by Josefina can raise the financing for this project on her own? Despite all international recognition, economic resources must be brought closer together. If not, we condemn them to economic pressure on their territories without benefiting them.”
Community leadership is in the region’s DNA. Here thousands of white, indigenous and black people stand in front of the continent’s barriers for those who want to defend the territory. Death among them. Latin America remains the area where the most activists are murdered each year. A third of them are racialized people. “Our area has a high concentration of natural wealth, poverty and institutional weakness. And protecting them is not enough.” For Mayolo, the biggest challenges in the academy are building trust in local communities, gaining access to territories and ensuring security.
Another of the most profound criticisms of Mayolo’s speech is the condescension with which he believes indigenous peoples are treated. “More research is needed to overcome this. The role of science is simply to take note of the resilience models and check whether they are reproducible.” He cites controlled logging or the use of water resources in rural communities as examples. “They know when to cut down, what kind of trees they have and when to let them grow. Our job is to document this and understand how they can function in similar ecosystems. Nothing else.”