Focus on Arts and Ecology

China is starting to proactively adapt but its climate-finance systems remain focused on cutting emissions. 

By Lin Zi, December 4, 2025

At the recent COP30 climate conference in Brazil, 160 diesel generators were positioned outside the Amazonian venue, rumbling night and day, ladening the tropical air with fumes. Inside, huge ventilation units lowered the temperature but added to the noise.

Adaptations like these aren’t just taking place temporarily and on a small scale. One priority of the Belém conference was how to ensure countries adapt to climate change impacts in the long term. Debate over funding this process, and how to track its progress, was particularly fierce. Would developing countries secure more money to take action on the ground? Could a common framework be created for measuring national progress to inform funding decisions?

China’s role in all this has drawn particular attention. The largest developing country is shifting from reacting to climate impacts to proactively adapting to them. How does China’s adaptation strategy differ from those in the west? With its need for funding rising rapidly as climate change bites, how can China mobilise the necessary financing?

Dialogue Earth asked experts from China and elsewhere these questions, exploring the choices and challenges the country faces on adaptation, financing methods and evaluating progress.

Adaptation with Chinese characteristics

A week before COP30 began, China submitted its latest climate action plan, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution, under the Paris Agreement. For the first time, it included language on climate adaptation, with a “climate-adapted society” to be mostly in place by 2035. Behind this lies a shift from reactive adaptation to a dual focus on proactive adaptation and mitigation (meaning efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions), creating a path to adaptation with Chinese characteristics.

Rebecca Nadin is director of global risks and resilience at the think-tank ODI Global and advised on the adaptation priorities mentioned in China’s five-year economic plan for 2016-2020.

She says both China’s latest adaptation strategy, published in 2022 and covering actions up to 2035, and the EU’s latest adaptation strategy, published in 2021, stress data-driven risk assessment and regional adaptation, but they differ regarding governance and to some extent focus.

The EU, she says, takes a decentralised approach. Its priorities include local empowerment, mainstreaming adaptation across sectors, and nature-based solutions. China’s strategy, by contrast, is highly centralised, with adaptation integrated in the five-year economic plans and a focus on hard adaptation measures. For instance, it emphasises early-warning and disaster-preventions systems, such as flood control and other major infrastructure. This aligns with China’s national development priorities, she said.

“China allocates significant resources, especially for large-scale infrastructure, but EU adaptation finance is more diversified, supporting a wider range of sectors – health, urban resilience, agriculture – and cross-border cooperation,” she said.

Industries key to China’s adaptation process will require over CNY 2 trillion (USD 280 billion) in funding every year between 2026 and 2030, according to the non-profit Huzhou Green Finance Institute. That is more than 1.2% of the country’s GDP, with more than half of it (57%, or CNY 1.16 trillion) needed for infrastructure.

China will need to invest more in adaptation for traditional infrastructure like buildings and water management, says Huzhou Green Finance Institute researcher Chen Yingjie. But there is also still not enough support for adaptation in other fields, including electricity, transportation, finance, education, health and social work, according to her team’s research.

“As climate change worsens, water management, agriculture and infrastructure face the most direct and obvious physical risks. Those sectors are very vulnerable and risks there will be transmitted onwards, to key sectors such as manufacturing and services, creating systemic impacts on the real economy,” she said.

The priorities for adaptation funding identified by her team were agriculture, forestry, fishing, health, electricity, heat, and gas and water management, along with transportation, warehousing and postal services.

The funding gap

The UN Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2025 puts developing nations’ funding requirements for 2035 at USD 310-365 billion. This is a giant leap from the USD 26 billion that was transferred from developed to developing nations for adaptation in 2023.

At COP30, it was agreed that developed nations would raise adaptation support to USD 120 billion by 2035.

For China, meanwhile, financial support from developed nations and preferential loans from multilateral development banks are both falling.

Between 2020 and 2022, China received only USD 530 million in international funding for climate adaptation, all for reconstruction after the 2021 Henan floods.

The Chinese government has pointed out that climate funding flowing into China for those three years totalled USD 2.6 billion – only 0.6% of the country’s own spending on climate mitigation and adaptation.

In other words, China has spent USD 436.7 billion on climate measures over those three years, at an annual average of USD 145.6 billion. There isn’t yet any data on China’s climate adaptation spend, but internationally adaptation accounts for less than 10% of total climate spending, according to a study published by the Climate Policy Initiative in 2024.

Shao Danqing is a researcher at the Macro and Green Finance Lab, a think-tank based at Peking University’s National School of Development. She told Dialogue Earth that China’s adaptation work is mostly funded by public money, but limited government budgets and a lack of enthusiasm from private investors means a severe shortfall.

“So why is there more of a gap for adaptation than for mitigation? It’s because adaptation, when compared with mitigation, is less likely to be commercially sustainable and therefore investable,” she explained.

Closing the funding gap

China will need an average of CNY 1.6 trillion (USD 226 billion) a year for climate adaptation between 2021 and 2060, according to a 2024 government document. That will mean mobilising climate and green finance on an unprecedented scale.

The country’s climate financing system has two strands. The first is led by the People’s Bank of China, which is creating a system of green finance and transition finance. The second is a set of city-level climate finance trials run by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

Each has a different emphasis, says Shao Danqing. The bank’s effort is focused on the supply side of investment. It aims to make investments greener by creating standards, regulatory frameworks and supporting policies for green and climate finance. The ministry, meanwhile, is looking more at the demand side, at actual practice on the ground. It is using city-level pilots to encourage local governments to set up project databases and related investment and financing mechanisms.

The 2025 revision of the Green Finance Taxonomy, led by the bank, labelled some project categories as contributing to emissions reduction for the first time, but did not indicate if any contribute to adaptation.

According to the bank, green loans worth CNY 36.6 trillion were issued in China in 2024. Of that, CNY 12.25 trillion went to projects with direct emissions reductions and CNY 12.44 trillion to projects with indirect reductions. Totalled, that accounts for 67.5% of all green loans. It’s hard to say, though, how much is going to adaptation work.

The ministry’s 2022 taxonomy for its climate-financing trials did cover both mitigation and adaptation but, overall, climate-finance systems in China remain focused on mitigation.

According to Shao Danqing: “Most projects are mainly about mitigation. Some might also have adaptation benefits, but that isn’t highlighted.” In agriculture, she gives the examples of reusing rather than burning straw, techniques to conserve water when irrigating, and smart agriculture.

How to evaluate adaptation?

Coming up with effective indicators to chart progress on adaptation is a global challenge. There was progress at COP30 where the first global set of indicators on adaptation – 59 of them – was adopted.

Xi Wenyi is a research associate with the World Resources Institute’s Climate and Energy Program. She told Dialogue Earth that quantitative targets in China’s adaptation strategy are mainly related to ecosystems, such as area of protected land, forest coverage and length of restored coastline.

More work on those targets is urgently needed. Another issue, though, is how to evaluate the benefits of adaptation work. Climate adaptation measures reduce climate vulnerability, making society and the economy more resilient. A typical example is an early-warning system. If the government can issue a warning in advance of floods, businesses and schools can shut down and prepare, reducing economic losses. In that case, the net benefit is easy to see and understand.

“But if the disaster being warned of doesn’t happen, it’s harder to evaluate the avoided losses,” said Chen Yingjie of Huzhou Green Finance Institute. Nevertheless, adaptation measures reduce physical risk and so cut investment and construction costs, as well as insurance premiums. The long-term benefits should not be overlooked, she said.

Nor is adaptation just about disasters. “A facility built for extreme weather events could be used as a community space day-to-day, improving the quality of life for residents, boosting property values, and bringing other benefits,” Chen added.

In May, the World Resources Institute published an analysis of 320 climate-investment projects from around the world. It found that each dollar invested into adaptation and resilience returned ten dollars in value over the following decade. That means benefits globally could be worth over USD 1.4 trillion, with an annual return on investment of 20-27%.

That analysis grouped the benefits into avoided losses, economic growth such as from increased manufacturing, and broader social and environmental benefits such as lower emissions.

Xi Wenyi used the same approach in a 2021 analysis she co-authored. Her team analysed efforts to mitigate the risks of agricultural drought in Ningxia, urban waterlogging in Wuhan and storm surges in Shenzhen. They found that each yuan invested brought benefits worth between two and 20 yuan.

At the lower end of that range was dike construction in Shenzhen and at the higher end, upgrading irrigation systems in Ningxia, she explained.

Shifting funds from fossil fuels to adaptation

Another key issue is how countries can make sure limited funds are channelled most effectively towards adaptation, rather than to low-value or wasteful projects.

Shao Danqing says: “China spends huge amounts of subsidies for various industries, but how much of that goes to mitigation and adaptation, and how much goes to activities with the opposite outcomes? There’s currently no transparency.”

Globally, big subsidies still flow to activities harmful to the climate. For example, upstream fossil-fuel firms and associated industries (such as transportation, refining and coal power) still benefit from tax breaks, investment subsidies, low-interest loans, finance underwriting, and even government procurement and long-term contracts. In 2022, subsidies for the fossil-fuel sector were worth USD 7 trillion globally.

“In many countries, subsidies are being used inefficiently or incorrectly. Those governments need to look at these and gradually redirect funds from ‘brown’ activities towards climate mitigation and adaptation,” said Shao Danqing.

As groundwater depletes, the region must protect farmers’ livelihoods while encouraging adoption of water-saving tech, writes Soumya Balasubramanya. 

By Soumya Balasubramanya, November 21, 2025

South Asia accounts for 50% of the groundwater pumped for irrigation globally. The practice has been critical to ensuring food security in the region, enabling farmers – predominantly smallholders – to increase food production. And yet the scale of use has caused levels of groundwater to fall worryingly quickly.

Several South Asian states and provinces have put in place measures to make groundwater accessible to farmers, creating new problems. As well as groundwater depletion, there have been financial losses for governments that provide subsidised power for electric pumps.

For policymakers and farmers alike, the challenge lies in addressing these problems without impacting livelihoods or compromising food security. Practical solutions exist, as we will see, but they only work when they are tailored to regional needs and involve collaboration between policymakers, farmers and researchers.

Extracting groundwater

Smallholders – with less than two hectares of land – produce the bulk of food in South Asia. They tend to be poor and often women. In Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal, the majority of workers in agriculture are women.

Smallholders are often reliant on groundwater, which they access through tubewells, to grow crops. Majority of tubewells are installed privately by the smallholders, with an estimated 30 million in the region. Poorer smallholders who are unable to afford their own tubewells buy water from those who have them.

The price of groundwater is derived from the energy sources used to extract it. Tubewells are fitted with pumps, which require energy such as diesel, electricity or solar.

Diesel pumps power the majority of tubewells in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh (74-90%), while in India, electric pumps power around 76% of tubewells.

With diesel pumps, farmers often pay for fuel out of pocket. Electric pumps are cheaper to operate thanks to power subsidies for irrigation, which are widespread across the region. Governments supply electricity for irrigation either free of charge or below market rates.

Subsidies: a double-edged sword

Subsidised electricity has contributed to food security by supporting farmer livelihoods, increasing food production and stabilising food prices. However, it has also contributed to electric utilities’ financial insolvency, and, perhaps more alarmingly, to wasteful irrigation and the depletion of aquifers, with depth to water falling by around 1.5 cm per year in north India between 2002 and 2021.

When tubewell owners pay electricity tariffs far below supply costs, governments shoulder the financial losses. A tubewell owner is also less likely to use water or electricity efficiently when they barely cost anything.

Solving these problems, however, is not simply about increasing energy prices. Apart from being politically unpopular, price increases would be challenging to implement as they would require metering electric tubewells, most of which are unmetered. Additionally, getting millions of farmers to accept being metered is no small feat.

More importantly, increasing electricity prices may harm farmers’ livelihoods and increase the price of food production. And because large-scale data on the sale and purchase of groundwater is not usually collected, implementing pricing reforms will be complicated.  

Consequently, policymakers are experimenting with alternative approaches.

Water-efficient technology

Among these is to increase the use of technologies that can potentially reduce wasteful irrigation.

One of these is direct seeded rice (DSR). With this method, farmers plant rice seeds directly in a moistened field instead of the traditional approach of germinating seedlings in a nursery and transplanting them. DSR eliminates the need for the constant field-flooding required by the transplantation process.

Another is alternate wetting and drying (AWD), in which farmers only periodically drain and re-flood rice fields. They install a perforated plastic pipe in the rice field to monitor water levels, and only flood the field when water in the pipe falls to about 15 cm below the surface of the soil.

Despite relatively low costs and efforts by regional governments to increase uptake of these technologies, adoption remains low. Farmers are sometimes put off by unintended effects of these methods. DSR and AWD, for example, both increase weeds in fields, reducing net profits.

The rewards and risks of solar pumping

Another approach, increasing in popularity, is powering the pumps with sunlight. In recent years, governments in South Asia have been subsidising solar-pump-and-panel kits.

In India alone, more than 500,000 small solar pumps had been installed as of 2023, from less than 4,000 in 2012.

Subsidising equipment is attractive for governments because it is one-time, unlike a recurring power subsidy. And farmer demand for solar pumps is high because of the lack of running costs. Empirical assessments from Nepal, as well as the Indian states of Rajasthan and Bihar, show that solar pumps increase the amount of irrigated areas and food production, because access to affordable water improves; this produces significant improvements in farmer incomes and livelihoods.

However, the assessments also confirm that the costless pumping will almost certainly encourage more pumping.

The potential of cash incentives

Another approach involves setting an entitlement of electricity units on tubewells for each well owner, without increasing prices, and offering to purchase unused electricity units at a rebate price. This strategy is being piloted by utilities in several Indian states.

The rebate price is set lower than what it costs the utility to supply energy, and higher than what farmers pay when they use electricity to pump groundwater. This incentivises the tubewell owner to avoid pumping unless it improves yield, because they can earn some money from selling unused electricity units.

Emerging evidence from pilot studies of such cash incentives in Punjab and Gujarat suggests mixed results in reductions of wasteful use of water and electricity. A 2022 paper I co-authored shows that in Punjab, when rice farmers were provided with uninterrupted daytime electricity, cash incentives can lead them to reduce power consumption by at least 7.5%, and irrigation hours by up to 30%, without impacting yields. A 2016 study from Gujarat, meanwhile, shows no evidence of cash incentives impacting water use.

The pilot programmes also reveal difficulties in setting the entitlements. This is challenging because most tubewells are unmetered, shrouding in mystery the history of usage at individual tubewells. Setting entitlements too low would punish farmers. Too high would defeat the purpose of the approach.  

Managing expectations and navigating trade-offs

Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. A practical approach may therefore be to acknowledge the trade-offs involved in the various strategies, between rescuing utilities, improving irrigation efficiency, reducing pressure on groundwater and supporting farmer livelihoods. Doing so may help policymakers choose a location-appropriate strategy.

For example, a 2023 paper on an experiment introducing AWD to 2,000 farmers in Bangladesh, found the technology led to conservation of water in areas where farmers paid modest payments for pumping. Deploying solar pumps in eastern parts of South Asia, where irrigation is underdeveloped and poverty is deep, has improved farmers’ access to water and thus crop yields.

Activating sensors where present on new solar and electric pumps can improve measurement and monitoring of how much groundwater is pumped out. In addition, introducing tailored questions on irrigation in agricultural census and sample questionnaires can generate data on use, including the buying and selling of groundwater.

In South Asia, where farmers continue to be poor, and where climate change is likely to exacerbate groundwater depletion, researchers should highlight the effects of potential policy approaches on smallholders in order to nudge policymakers towards contextually appropriate solutions.  

Collaborations between policymakers, farmers and researchers can produce actionable knowledge and identify practical solutions. Policymakers can benefit from the lessons that theory and empirical evidence have to offer. Researchers can learn from the challenges that implementers face to better target their endeavours.

Ultimately, however, to manage complex trade-offs and to make discernible progress in managing groundwater resources for livelihoods, centering farmers’ needs is vital. After all, it is through such co-creation that the Green Revolution came about. 

Soumya Balasubramanya

Global temperatures are surging but heat’s complexity and social aspects are being overlooked, argue two academics. 

By Akshay Rajeev, Jonathan Lee, November 19, 2025

In climate conversations, heat is often treated as a number. It is a threshold to watch out for, a line not to be crossed. But in many parts of the world, heat does not arrive alone.

It comes with humidity, applying an invisible pressure to the human body that is poorly understood and dangerously underreported. We call it humid heat: a combination of high temperatures and moisture in the air.

Humid heat is increasingly seen as one of the most dangerous weather extremes. But current ways of measuring and responding to it often fail to reflect the lived experiences of many people. This is especially the case in regions where efforts to adapt to the changing climate have been limited.

Dangers of humidity on the body

When exposed to high temperatures, a body’s primary response is two-fold.

First, it tries to dissipate the internal heat by redirecting blood away from the core and toward the skin and extremities. Second, it produces sweat which carries heat away from the skin as it evaporates.

How effective this process is depends on how well the sweat can evaporate. When humidity is high, sweat cannot evaporate easily because of the large amount of moisture already in the air. The sweat is therefore trapped on the skin, making it harder to cool down.

To envisage what this is like, imagine trying to breathe through a damp cloth or wrapping yourself in a wet blanket on a hot day. As humidity rises, even moderate temperatures can feel suffocating. The body’s core temperature begins to climb, straining its ability to regulate internal heat and placing extra pressure on the heart and circulation.

Our bodies will continue to produce sweat even in high humidity levels, but to little benefit. As well as not solving overheating, all the sweating now creates another problem, as it leaves the body dehydrated. This further strains the cardiovascular system and potentially damages cells, tissues and organs. Left unchecked, this can lead to confusion, collapse and even organ failure and death.

Measuring the heat

There are several ways to measure heat stress, each with its limitations.

A commonly used metric is the wet bulb temperature (WBT), traditionally measured with a thermometer bulb covered by a damp cloth. As air flows over the cloth, it draws out heat and brings the reading down. WBT combines air temperature and humidity to indicate how well our bodies can cool down through sweating and evaporation. A key input is relative humidity, which indicates how much moisture is in the air compared to the maximum the air can hold at that temperature. When WBT reaches 35C (a commonly used theoretical upper limit for human survivability) even healthy people resting in the shade may no longer be able to maintain a safe core temperature. WBT is a useful indicator but it assumes a breeze, which may not always reflect the real world.

For outdoor settings, especially in workplaces or the military, a more comprehensive measure is the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT). It adds the effects of solar radiation and wind speed, offering a more realistic assessment of heat stress for physical activity in the sun. But WBGT still misses crucial factors, like housing quality, access to cooling or underlying health risks.

The most widely used public metric is the heat index, which combines air temperature and relative humidity to give a “feels like” value. But it assumes shade, light wind and healthy, acclimatised individuals, making it poorly suited for the conditions many people face.

In short, none of these tools fully capture real-world risk, particularly in humid regions with poor infrastructure and high social vulnerability.

The problem with 35C limits

As scientific interest in humid heat has grown, so has public attention, though not always with clarity. The WBT threshold of 35C is frequently cited in the media as a definitive limit between survivable and fatal conditions. While it is true that sustained exposure to such extremes can be deadly, this framing can be misleading. It implies that anything below 35C is safe, when serious health effects can occur well before that point, especially with prolonged exposure, physical exertion or a lack of cooling.

These thresholds are often treated as universal, which overlooks how vulnerability varies depending on a person’s occupation, housing, underlying health and ability to adapt. The duration of exposure also plays a crucial role, as even moderate humid heat can become dangerous if sustained over many hours or repeated day after day. Public agencies, healthcare workers, emergency responders, journalists and even researchers may unintentionally reinforce this misunderstanding, by focusing on such simplified thresholds instead of acknowledging a spectrum of risks. The human body does not respond to heat in absolute values, and our assessments should reflect that complexity.

The disconnect between measured thresholds and actual vulnerability has serious consequences.

Because humid heat often unfolds quietly and without a single dramatic spike, its toll is frequently absent from official records. People may collapse from what is recorded as cardiac arrests, strokes or respiratory failures with no mention that heat was a contributing factor. In many parts of the world facing rising levels of humid heat, particularly in rural or informal settings, heat-related illness and death go underreported or misclassified. This is due to a combination of limited surveillance systems and systemic gaps in recognising how heat contributes to health outcomes.

Heat is rarely recorded as a contributing factor in cases like stroke or cardiac arrest, even when high temperatures may have exacerbated preexisting conditions. As a result, heat-related deaths are attributed to underlying illnesses, leaving the true impact of humid heat hidden in official records. This undercounting makes it harder to raise public awareness, design early-warning systems or allocate resources for heat action plans.

In the absence of reliable data, the burden of humid heat remains largely invisible, especially for the poor, the elderly and those with preexisting health conditions.

Unequal risks from the same heat

Even when temperatures are the same, not everyone experiences heat in the same way. A construction worker labouring under the direct sun, a child in a tin-roofed classroom, and an older adult in a crowded, poorly ventilated home all face very different levels of risk. Access to cooling, shade, ventilation, clean water and medical care plays a major role in shaping outcomes. Yet these resources are unequally distributed.

In many cities dealing with humid heat, air conditioning is still a privilege of the wealthy. Meanwhile, informal workers, from delivery riders to street vendors, often have no choice but to stay outdoors during the hottest parts of the day. Rural populations, particularly women and older adults, may be indoors but in buildings that trap heat and lack airflow.

Even where cooling is available, access to electricity is not guaranteed. Power grids are increasingly strained during heatwaves and can also be knocked out by compounding hazards, like pre-monsoon storms or cyclones. Such outages leave millions exposed just when they most need relief.

These differences in exposure, occupation, infrastructure and energy access mean heat stress is deeply tied to socioeconomic inequality. It disproportionately affects the same communities already at risk from poverty, marginalisation and poor health access.

Community solutions to heat

Heat stress is not only a meteorological phenomenon. There are social, political, economic and historical determinants as to why certain areas are hotter than others and why certain people are more exposed and less able to adapt than others.

This means the solutions for protecting everyone from the dangers of heat must also consider these determinants to be successful.

Policies and programmes that improve the social safety net of communities also improve their ability to adapt to heat. The Clean Power Prescription programme at Boston Medical Center in the United States, for example, gives low-income patients the ability to pay their energy bills with a prescription, written by their primary care provider. Microgrid projects that build small and localised power networks can also help. These allow communities to generate their own energy, thus reducing their reliance on power from national grids during outages and allowing them to keep running fans and air conditioning.

Other US programmes that bring cooling directly to communities have also been shown to be successful, such as air conditioning giveaways, or the Community Lighthouse programme in New Orleans. The latter turns existing community spaces, such as churches, into designated cooling spaces, by adding solar power and back-up battery capacity. This provides somewhere for people without sufficient cooling at home to go and find safety and comfort.

As the frequency and intensity of heat continue to rise globally, we must go beyond the individual measures of protection and adaptation and create new ways of caring for one another that can withstand the pressure, no matter how hot and humid things get.

Akshay Rajeev contributed to this article in a voluntary capacity.

Despite cultural, political and gender barriers, these women are leading forest restoration efforts and preserving ancestral knowledge. 

By Dunio Chiriap Jimbicti, November 20, 2025

Deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a silent but powerful movement is flourishing in the hands of Indigenous women. Faced with the advance of climate change and deforestation, members of the Shuar community of San Luis Ininkis in Morona Santiago province have decided to sow life: they are reforesting with native species, protecting water sources and passing on their ancestral wisdom to new generations.

This has not been easy. Although their actions are vital for the protection of the tropical forest, Shuar women face a series of barriers that limit the dissemination and recognition of their practices. These include tensions with state conservation policies, gender stereotypes that persist even within their communities, and a lack of equitable access to resources and decision-making.

Guardians of the forest

Clareth Ankuash, 47, is a Shuar woman from San Luis Ininkis. From childhood, she learned from her mother and grandmothers to recognise the power of plants. “My mother taught me to talk to plants. To listen to the jungle,” she says in a quiet voice. Today, she leads a community nursery called Siembra Vida, meaning Sow Life, or Iwiakma Araatá in the Shuar language. This is where native species used for both reforestation and traditional medicine are grown. Her role has been key to the success of this space, which not only provides trees but also hope.

Currently, 10 people work in the nursery. Most are women, although some men also participate, such as Ankuash’s husband, Antonio Jimbicti, and occasionally other members of the community.

This nursery has a family feel: Ankuash’s daughters also help her to run it, providing training to other women in the community: five women are learning about seed selection, germination and the care of native species.

Ankuash opened the nursery six years ago. She works with other women from the community on the selection, germination and planting of species such as balsa (Ochroma pyramidale), cedar (Cedrela odorata), chonta (Bactris gasipaes) and guayusa (Ilex guayusa). These plants not only help to restore the forest, but also strengthen the Shuar cultural identity, as they are deeply linked to their worldview. Reforestation, in this context, is also a form of cultural resistance.

Living knowledge versus external models

This traditional wisdom has survived for centuries, but it is at odds with conservation models promoted from outside the community. State policies and NGO programmes working with communities often impose western approaches to environmental management, without recognising the deep knowledge that communities already have. “Sometimes, the technicians come and want to teach us how to take care of the forest, but they don’t know what it’s like to live here, they don’t know our plants, our stories,” explains Ankuash. This imposition of external knowledge creates tensions and, in many cases, weakens the autonomy of communities.

Reactions to these situations have been mixed. Some communities have rejected projects that do not respect their worldview or that arrive without real prior consultation. On more than one occasion, they have decided to stop working with certain NGOs or government institutions, especially when they seek to impose their methodologies without listening to local voices.

However, there have also been processes of dialogue and negotiation. In certain cases, communities have managed to make technicians and officials understand the importance of incorporating their cultural and territorial perspective into environmental programmes. This has happened when there is openness to intercultural dialogue and political will to build together.

For example, in San Luis Ininkis, the community nursery is not part of a state or NGO programme. It was started by the community itself. They have occasionally received visits from technical experts but have only accepted collaboration when respect is given to their way of working. This is based on oral tradition, spirituality and knowledge shared within the community.

“It’s not about saying ‘no’ to everything from outside,” Ankuash clarifies, “but about being listened to first. We do want support, but with respect. We are not recipients, we are guardians of the forest, and we also know how to teach.”

Despite these limitations, Shuar women remain committed to their own ways of conservation, based on oral tradition, spirituality and daily practice. “We don’t just plant plants, we plant memories,” Ankuash says firmly.

Gender and territory: A double struggle

The women face difficulties within their own communities, too, where their role in these initiatives has not always been recognised. Even though they are the ones who protect the seeds, cultivate the gardens and heal with plants, their work has historically been invisible or relegated to the domestic sphere.

Yadira Kasent is the deputy mayor of Morona, a canton of Morona Santiago province. She is also a Shuar woman and has experienced these tensions first-hand. At 34, she is an environmental leader who promotes environmental care projects from within the institutional framework. “Women have a very special bond with the land, but we also have to break down many barriers to be heard, both outside and within our communities,” she says.

In her local authority role, Kasent has promoted the inclusion of an intercultural and gender perspective in cantonal environmental policies. She has led discussions between Shuar communities, environmental technicians and authorities, seeking to have ancestral practices – such as the planting of medicinal plants, the use of the lunar calendar in crop cultivation and rituals of gratitude to the earth – recognised as valid tools for environmental management.

One of the projects she has promoted, in coordination with women leaders from several communities, is the creation of small community nurseries run by women. These initiatives not only encourage reforestation with native species, but also strengthen the family economy, women’s leadership and food sovereignty. In some cases, women have managed to receive technical assistance through an intercultural approach adapted to their own ways of learning.

In addition, Kasent has proposed a cantonal ordinance that seeks to declare ancestral knowledge as intangible heritage and the basis for local environmental planning. The proposal has been shared with community elders and suggests that reforestation and conservation plans include practices such as the identification of mother plants, the use of songs and rituals during planting, and respect for the natural cycles of the forest.

Although these initiatives still face resistance, especially in institutional spaces dominated by technical or patriarchal views, they represent a firm step towards a more just, inclusive ecology rooted in Indigenous wisdom. As Kasent says: “We want our girls to grow up knowing that they can be wise women of the forest, but also leaders, technicians, councillors. We don’t want them to have to choose between the ancestral and the modern, but to be able to walk with both forms of knowledge.”

Barriers to recognition

One of the main obstacles faced by Shuar women is the lack of access to resources: secure land, technical support, financing for their nurseries and training tailored to their realities. For example, only 25% of agricultural production units in Ecuador are run by women, and less than 30% of land titles in the Ecuadorian Amazon are held by women.

Another barrier is the limited dissemination of their knowledge in academic, media and educational spaces. According to a Unesco report, less than 5% of educational content in Latin America includes references to Indigenous knowledge as part of the formal curriculum. Although many women like Ankuash have a deep understanding of the environment, they are rarely recognised as experts. Instead, Indigenous knowledge continues to be treated as “complementary” or “alternative” to the dominant western scientific approaches, she says.

Pathways to environmental and cultural justice

Despite these challenges, Shuar women continue to make progress. In the community of San Luis Ininkis, the knowledge of the elderly women has begun to be documented in audiovisual formats and written down, so that new generations can learn from them.

Intercommunity exchanges are also underway. Networks between the communities of San Luis Ininkis, Pastaza and Morona Santiago facilitate the exchange of native seeds, cultivation techniques and experiences of resistance. A project supported by Ibercocinas, a programme of the Ibero-American General Secretariat, strengthened 10 ancestral bio-gardens led by Shuar women. The project also included training in agroecology and community economics.

Reforesting the future from the roots

The stories of Ankuash, Kasent and so many other Shuar women expose problems in the fight against climate change. It is not just about technology or international agreements but also about valuing the practices that have cared for the environment for centuries. As they have shown, there are lessons to be learned from these women if structural barriers are broken down.

Climate justice cannot be achieved without gender justice and without the recognition of ancestral knowledge as the basis for a sustainable future. This is also the view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which highlights in its sixth report the need to integrate local and Indigenous knowledge to achieve effective solutions to climate change.

Shuar women are not only reforesting the forest: they are reforesting the future, from their own roots, with wisdom, strength and love for the land.

Dunio Chiriap Jimbicti