Climate Resilience from the Global South

 How ancestral knowledge, community care, and territorial identity shape our response to the climate crisis

In the Global South, climate resilience is not just a technical strategy. It’s a lived practice. It’s the rhythm of communities who have long learned how to survive, in territories shaped by both beauty and struggle.

As a Black woman from Bahia, Brazil, I don’t separate my understanding of climate from my sense of place. The mangroves, the tides, the wind, they carry memory. Our resilience is rooted in this relationship with the land and with each other.

Where I come from, climate resilience looks like marisqueiras who protect the mangrove because they know it protects them. A legacy of persistence. It looks like youth organizing festivals that celebrate territory, identity, and resistance, turning pain into poetry.

Justice is not just a concept printed in official frameworks. Climate justice is not officially recognized in most policy documents, yet it pulses in the daily life of coastal, riverine, and island communities, where people live and sustain themselves from nature’s gifts. They do not dominate the land with concrete. They build homes that breathe with the surroundings. These are places where sanitation is lacking, where schools and markets are far, and where access is a struggle, yet people remain present, active, creating, surviving. So instead of imposing on these territories, we must learn from them.

It means reclaiming land. Reconnecting with community. Regenerating ecosystems that capitalism tried to erase. And doing all of this with joy, rhythm, and care.

Climate resilience is a practice of social justice too.

At Yllá Regenera, we believe in this kind of resilience, one that honors ancestry, uplifts local knowledge, and dares to dream beyond catastrophe. Because the South is not only where climate disasters hit hardest. It’s also where the most powerful solutions are being born.