It’s tricky to capture a vision for the future in words alone – which is why we’ve included this song to complement the text.

We woke up early one morning and took an hour-long bus ride from Brasília, the capital of Brazil, to the heart of the Cerrado – the world’s largest savanna. 

This excursion formed part of the GLF Latin America & Caribbean Community and Action Assembly 2025, where we were invited to eat foods made with ingredients native to the Cerrado, such as pequi fruit, tenderly prepared by women working with the land.

We were warmly welcomed by Vinicius Santos, who led us along a thin dirt path between two fields. 

To our left was a barren dirt lot. To our right were fields full of recently planted native grasses and shrubs – an area restored by APROSPERA, a non-profit association of agricultural producers. 

APROSPERA is part of the Landless Workers’ Movement, the largest agrarian social movement in the Americas, which advocates land reform across Brazil.

Throughout the day, we learned how they irrigate their gardens, plant native species and prepare food boxes for residents of nearby cities – all while providing a steady source of income for their families. Above all, they welcomed us with great care.

Before spending the day in the Cerrado, we’d spent a week discussing land rights, environmental justice and the challenges and successes we encounter in our communities across Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Collectively, we imagined how landscapes could be best managed to prioritize Indigenous knowledge, food sovereignty and inclusive community governance.

We envisioned alternatives to capitalism and extractivism by rethinking the relationships between land tenure and property. We also discussed how adding value to raw products at the local level can help break the colonial model that casts our region as an endless exporter of raw resources.

This extractive model has long left our people to absorb the environmental damage caused by deforestation, soil erosion and climate extremes such as droughts.

As we felt the tough, resilient grasses of the Cerrado and filled our bellies with nutritious foods, we discovered that our work creates myriad alternative ways to grow, eat, restore land and do business across the Americas.

Rooted in our passion and experience as leaders in our communities, our vision for Latin America and the Caribbean is one of justice, ecological restoration and human dignity. 

Our dream is to see landscapes and communities thrive and address the climate, social and food crises from a place of abundance. 

Ancestral roots in people’s sovereignty

Long before colonial powers reached the Americas, the Indigenous Peoples of what is now known as Latin America and the Caribbean were sovereign. 

They tended to their land and communities with autonomy – sowing seeds, passing down stories and caring for those in their communities. Countless communities have retained these traditions, but the legacy of colonialism has devastated Indigenous autonomy and land rights.

Much of our shared struggle today revolves around bureaucracy, state oppression and legal procedures that conflict with community values. 

Moreover, extractive industries such as mining, oil and agribusiness are also hugely responsible for the destruction of our landscapes.

The struggle for a just future means correcting these historical injustices. 

“By connecting with our roots, we sow resilience,” says Yuliana Rodriguez Mongui.

“The stories of our ancestors being sovereign over their seeds, the stories of pride where we knew what to do with the richness of our territory, to be abundant and prosperous – all those stories transform how we perceive ourselves and the internal power we feel to create change now to build a different future.”

Many people across the region are now actively revitalizing and defending their heritage and traditional ways of caring for the land and one another.

For Baruch Aguilar, this looks like young people using their education and passion to “carry a message of resilience and resistance to promote paradigm shifts in our communities.”

In rural Ecuador, young people are blending ancestral knowledge of chakras – an ancestral, biodiverse agroforestry system used by Indigenous Kichwa communities in the Andes and Amazon to care for the water and land.

Mery Montesdeoca says this intergenerational work combines young people’s passion with the experience of elders and is “transforming the narrative of the ‘abandoned countryside’ into one of a territory that is cared for.” 

When communities come together, they build trust and a full sense of governance. True prosperity, in this view, is not just economic growth but collective wellbeing, resistance to extractive models, ecological balance and justice.

Rights for land defenders and minorities

Defending land often comes at great personal risk. 

Concrete policies are needed to protect land guardians and enable communities to safely restore their lands, pursue sustainable livelihoods and safeguard their wellbeing. This must include formal land rights for Indigenous Peoples and other oppressed social groups.

“There can be no restoration without social justice,” says Montesdeoca.

Central to this fight is the invaluable work of women and youth, whose work often goes unrecognized. Caring for landscapes must mean caring for the people who sustain them.

Women often play a key role in providing water, seeds and food within their communities. Their knowledge and efforts are invaluable and should be respected as such.

“The experience of farmers, fishers, women caregivers, organized youth and rural communities is extremely important and key, because by directly experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis, they can observe climate cycles, soils, water availability or changes in surrounding biodiversity,” says Jessica Manchan. 

Lived experience and community knowledge is crucial to understanding the cycles of nature and making practical land use decisions.

This leadership ensures that restoration is understood not just as physical rehabilitation but as a holistic process to restore social relationships and collective rights.

We urgently need laws that protect leaders and communities dedicated to restoration who face land invasions and other threats. 

However, laws by themselves are not enough. They must be properly enforced, with financial backing for services such as forest guards in Brazil, who do the dangerous work of combating the industries that drive environmental destruction. 

Justice for the region must include security for its guardians.

Upholding community governance 

The future of Latin American landscapes lies in community governance. This entails local actors holding the power to shape policy and development across their lands – as is already being done in many pockets across the region.

On Guatemala’s Pacific coast, Nelson Geovanni Yanes Gutiérrez is working with his community to recover riverbanks and rescue native species.

In El Salvador, Jessica Manchan is helping her community adopt agroecology and regenerative agriculture to improve soil health and reforest land to boost climate resilience. 

And in San Rafael, Colombia, Daniela Daza and her community are embracing bioconstruction – building with naturally available materials to boost ecotourism. This work is driven by community values and now offers a source of income while also promoting awareness around native species restoration. 

“I believe the voices of youth in movement and action, together with communities, make transformation happen – promoting political advocacy for the achievement of rights, contributing to the development of regionally appropriate policies, generating local incomes and providing contextualized education,” says Gean Magalhães.

We must ask ourselves: can we envision alternative ways of life that don’t revolve around extractivism? How can we reimagine community-led economies that value wellbeing and honor local value systems for land use?

For community governance to be truly inclusive, it must also enable young people to express their views.

“Making space for young people’s voices to be heard is crucial to involving young people and building bridges to ancestral knowledge, helping them understand the vital importance of restoring our ecosystems,” says Nelson Yanes.

“In my community, for example, we integrate [young people] into the management of forest nurseries and restoration workdays, but we must go further.

“A powerful strategy would be to work directly with educational centers, visit classrooms and share not only our activities but the deep knowledge and urgency that drives our work – thus planting the seed of environmental awareness in new generations.”

Networks of solidarity and care

While every country in Latin America and the Caribbean has its own culture and history, there is a strong sentiment of buen vivir – living well – that is shared across the region. 

Buen vivir is rooted in the warmth we share: caring for one another by sharing what we have, passing down our stories and relying on family and friends. It’s also about breaking the colonial mold of viewing humanity as separate from land and nature and instead understanding that we are part of nature.

At the community scale, the concept often still binds our people tightly to a deep care for our land. By forming networks of care, as we did during the Community and Action Assembly, we unite in sharing our knowledge, thus building sovereignty and self-determination.

This work also extends beyond rural areas. As cities become more and more populous, urban dwellers must also learn to live in harmony with the Earth and one another.

“Where I live, there are collectives that are rethinking our relationship with trash: transforming waste into organic matter, strengthening the circular economy, recovering useful materials and deconstructing the logic of landfills,” says Natalia Figueiredo, a resident of Rio de Janeiro.

“Most human beings are closer to being climate refugees than to being millionaires,” says Yuliana Rodriguez Mongui. 

“I call on us to stop chasing the ideals that have been sold to us as the only indicator of success – ideals that exploit our bodies and extinguish our spirit. Instead, let’s seek buen vivir, which is the root of our struggle across Latin America and the Global South, by coming together with our communities.”

During our week together in Brasília, Daniela Daza led the group in a powerful meditation. She shared smudge sticks and essential oils that she and her community had handmade with naturally available materials in San Rafael, Colombia. She asked us to close our eyes, drop into our bodies and channel joy and gratitude.

Working to protect and conserve the Earth is challenging work. This reflective moment reminded us all that to pour our love and passion into our lands and people, we must also care for ourselves.

This story, curated by the GLF editorial team, represents the work and aspirations of nine Latin American and Caribbean leaders who attended the GLF Latin America & Caribbean Community and Action Assembly 2025 in Brasília, Brazil.

Baruch Aguilar, 2025 Ocean Restoration Steward (Mexico)

Daniela Daza, project manager, San Rafael Local Tourism Network and GLFx San Rafael de Antioquía (Colombia)

Natalia Figueiredo, marketing and communications lead, Outlab, and environmental journalist (Brazil)

Nelson Geovanni Yanes Gutiérrez, GLFx South Coast Guatemala

Gean Magalhães, GLFx Quilombo Lagoas (Brazil)

Pedro (Pê) Mourão de Moura Magalhães, GLFx Latin America & Caribbean Hub Officer

Jessica Susana Manchan Bruno, GLFx Plan de Amayo (El Salvador)

Yuliana Rodriguez Mongui, development director, Youth4Nature (Colombia)

Mery Montesdeoca, project manager, Fundación Tierra Viva, and GLFx Imbabura (Ecuador)