A burning issue in South America: how to ensure an economic future for people affected by extreme weather events
In 2024, Bolivia burned with a thousand fires. These wildfires, which are an annual occurrence, were the worst on record, with 12.6 million hectares, four times the size of a country like Belgium, going up in smoke. Many Indigenous communities saw all or part of their territory consumed by the flames. Twenty-five out of the 60 Indigenous communities belonging to the Paikoneka Indigenous Centre of San Javier (CIP-SJ), in eastern Bolivia, were affected.
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The fires have led to the largest temporary migration in the history of the Paikoneka Indigenous Centre: "One in five families has had to move to the city to find paid work and be able to buy food," he adds. Three months after the fires ended, the situation had not yet returned to normal.
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The International Center for Tropical Agriculture is trying to change this at local level by giving small-scale producers, who account for 80 per cent of the sub-continent's farms, the tools and training they need to understand and assess for themselves how climate change will affect their crops.
One of the most successful projects is being implemented in Guatemala and Honduras, in the Central American Dry Corridor, a region characterised by irregular rainfall and high sensitivity to climate variability, making it particularly vulnerable to climate change.
This region is home to what the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT call 'climate-smart villages', where communities work together with researchers to identify the farming practices best suited to climate change. "Small agricultural plots have been established with their own water harvesting and irrigation systems, with varieties that are resilient to different temperatures and different levels of rainfall," explains Martínez-Barón. The ultimate aim is to ensure that, once trained, the producers are fully autonomous and can pass on this knowledge to others.
This article has been translated from French.