‘Come join us on this adventure’: What caring for the environment means to communities in Ecuador
In northern Ecuador, an innovative project champions community-based environmental management — and empowers local and displaced communities to tell their own stories about why it matters.
Thriving natural environments are crucial to flourishing human life, now and in the future. Celebrating different ways of thinking about, engaging with, and being in our natural world is essential to ensuring we can all care for people and the planet — and learn from each other in the process. For Earth Day 2023, we’re exploring an Innovation, Environment and Resilience Fund project in Ecuador that seeks to do just that.
Through the Innovation, Environment, and Resilience Programme, the Innovation Service is working to test early stage innovations and develop new ideas and approaches to the climate and environmental crises. We aim to ensure UNHCR is equipped not only to respond to adverse impacts, but also to anticipate challenges, make our interventions more sustainable, and enable forcibly displaced communities to build their resilience.
The project in northern Ecuador champions community-based environmental management, by testing mitigation and adaptation solutions based on traditional and Indigenous knowledge in five ecosystems where the increasing impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are compounding vulnerabilities.
In a region where extreme weather events are increasingly affecting Ecuadorians, as well as Venezuelan refugees and migrants, including damaging homes and livelihoods, the project aims to boost the resilience of communities and strengthen their capacity for and knowledge of sustainable environmental management. In this way, refugees, migrants, and Ecuadorians create a space for integration, where they join forces to improve living conditions and support a healthy environment — for example, with better flood prevention — for both the displaced and those who host them.
Alongside components on recycling and sustainable construction, the project also engaged with local communities, including ethnic-minority and Indigenous groups, as well as displaced populations to enable them to share their own stories about what their social and natural environment means to them. Through communications workshops in all five locations, refugee and local young people teamed up to create videos or podcasts about their lives in their communities, and how they’re helping to shape and transform them.
Stuar Ramos, a 23-year-old from Colombia living in the Ecuadorian city of Tulcán, relished the opportunity the workshops offered. “We see all this technology on the TV and in digital media, but I’d never had the opportunity to interact with it,” Stuar said. “So, in the workshops I learned how to use the camera, how to produce videos, and that was what I loved the most and I felt super comfortable.”
In El Pampanal de Bolivar, a town on the Colombian border, one group of participants used their new skills to invite the viewer along for an exploration of the mangrove ecosystem their community calls home. With infectious enthusiasm, the video shares their pastimes and priorities, and explores what caring for this environment means to them. “Let’s take care of our mangrove, because we live from them,” one participant says. “There are fishes, shells, shrimps and crabs. We eat from them, we live from them.”
Watch their beautiful, energizing video here:
Stuar’s group, in Túlcan, provides a tour of the city’s central market, exploring the dishes and ingredients that are essential to the community. “The arepas arrived to brighten the palate of the entire continent,” the viewer learns, before being whisked away to the town’s cemetery, ecopark, and recycling centre. Along the way, community members speak about local art, traditions, ecosystems, and livelihoods — and how they’re all interconnected.
Watch their thought-provoking, wide-ranging video here:
Other videos and podcasts created by community members focus on Indigenous materials and worldviews; the transnational connections between Indigenous groups in Latin America; local cultural products, languages, and identities; and different means of coexisting harmoniously with nature. This exchange of knowledge helps inspire others about what they can do to support their environments, and emphasizes that such action does not mean compromising on people’s lifestyles.
Co-creating content with communities, or ensuring they have the tools to create their own, is a powerful way to ensure displaced people and those worst affected by climate and environmental impacts can make their voices heard. In empowering participants to shape their own narratives and tell their own stories, this project champions local creativity and knowledge, encouraging UNHCR and other humanitarian and development actors to engage in active listening.
This is just one of 10 remarkable projects endorsed in the first round of the Innovation, Environment and Resilience Fund. The Fund particularly encourages nature-based solutions, cross-disciplinary approaches, and initiatives championing Indigenous or traditional knowledge. Designing and implementing these innovative solutions in close collaboration with forcibly displaced people and their hosts is a core principle, to ensure their skills, capacities, and priorities are built in.
On Earth Day and every day, UNHCR is testing innovative approaches to deliver lasting benefits to people and the planet, with and for refugees, in recognition that such action is crucial to our mandate to provide international protection and humanitarian assistance.
Read more about the Innovation, Environment and Resilience Fund here.
