To the People of the Earth:

I started my career working with ancestral mining communities in northern Cauca, Colombia, a region rich in cultural, social, and economic diversity, and full of conflicts over the resources found there. That experience shaped the way I approach every territory I work in: with respect, and with real curiosity about how people relate to the world around them.

My Master’s thesis in Local and Territorial Development took that further. I studied “El Cuamil,” a community garden collective in Tapalpa, Jalisco, made up of eight people growing organic food for their own consumption. Through that research, I explored food autonomy: communities’ right to decide, on their own terms, how they produce and consume food. I saw firsthand how something as small as a shared garden can become an act of resistance against an agri-food system that pushes people away from their own land and their own decisions.

At the same time, I found a way to bring in the other side of who I am: my passion for technology. Using open biodiversity data from GBIF, I ran a complete machine learning pipeline on nearly 54,000 bird records in Calarcá, Quindío, identifying three distinct ecological clusters. That analysis led to concrete recommendations for conservation and birdwatching tourism routes, grounded in a stakeholder analysis across academia, tourism, environmental authorities, and local communities. It’s proof, for me, that data and territory don’t have to be separate conversations. I also support farmers’ markets in my own community and take part in a project recovering Unconventional Native Plants (PANNC), smaller efforts, but ones that keep me rooted in the same question: who gets to decide what grows, and what we eat.

For me, this is central: climate restoration isn’t only a scientific challenge. It has to be built with communities and their territories. I want to bring both my professional experience (connecting technical tools with real needs) and my personal commitment to the land, to carry this message to parts of Latin America still left out of that conversation, and to make sure the solutions are thought through from the local level up. That’s why I want to become a Climate Restoration Ambassador: to put this experience (technical, personal, and territorial) in service of a movement that’s already thinking at the scale this crisis demands.